Exploring Semiotic Remediation as Discourse Practice

Exploring Semiotic Remediation as Discourse Practice Also by Paul A. Prior WRITING/DISCIPLINARITY: a Sociohistoric Ac...

Author: Paul A. Prior | Julie A. Hengst

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Exploring Semiotic Remediation as Discourse Practice

Also by Paul A. Prior WRITING/DISCIPLINARITY: a Sociohistoric Account of Literate Activity in the Academy (1998) WHAT WRITING DOES AND HOW IT DOES IT: an Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices (co-edited with Charles Bazerman, 2004)

Exploring Semiotic Remediation as Discourse Practice Edited by

Paul A. Prior and

Julie A. Hengst University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Selection and editorial matter © Paul A. Prior and Julie A. Hengst 2010 Chapters © their individual authors 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–22101–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

List of Figures

vii

Preface

ix

Acknowledgment

xii

Notes on the Contributors

xiii

1 Introduction: Exploring Semiotic Remediation Paul A. Prior and Julie A. Hengst

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2 The ‘Poetry Slam,’ Mathemagicians, and Middle School Math: Tracing Trajectories of Actors and Artifacts Kevin Roozen

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3 ‘On the Many Forms it Took throughout’: Engineering a Multipart, Multiple Site Rhetorical Event Jody Shipka

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4 Negotiating Moral Stance in Classroom Discussion about Literature: Entextualization and Contextualization Processes in a Narrative Spell Mary M. Juzwik 5 Semiotic Remediation, Conversational Narratives and Aphasia Julie A. Hengst 6 Resemiotization of a Policy Initiative: Promoting Open Disclosure as ‘Open Communication about Clinical Adverse Events’ Rick Iedema 7 Mediating Modes of Representation in Understanding Science: the Case of Genetic Inheritance Barry Saferstein and Srikant Sarangi v

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107

139

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Contents

8 Citizens Doing Science in Public Spaces: Rhetorical Invention, Semiotic Remediation, and Simple Little Texts Jeffrey T. Grabill and Stuart Blythe 9 Remaking IO: Semiotic Remediation in the Design Process Paul A. Prior Semiotic Remediation: Afterword Judith T. Irvine

184 206 235

References

243

Author Index

261

Subject Index

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List of Figures

2.1 Images of Brian’s Math 302 notebook showing his use of pi (at left) and the unit circle (at right) 2.2 Transcript (at left) and cards (at right) employed to explain pi as a means of scoring poems performed during the Poetry Slam sketch 2.3 Signs created by Brian’s middle school students and displayed in his classroom 2.4 Excerpts of Brian’s notes regarding magical abilities based on two categories of mathematics: algebra (above) and analysis (below) 2.5 Copy of the character sheet describing John Russel, one of the mathemagican characters that Brian created for the Jumpers role-playing game 3.1 Bill’s storyline from his Statement of Goals and Choices on the left juxtaposed with text and images from different students’ blue books on the right 3.2 A segment of ‘Blue Book Perspective Translation’ 3.3 A segment of ‘My Personal Translation’ 3.4 Stage area of ‘coffeehouse’ 3.5 Seating area of ‘coffeehouse’ 4.1 Map of classroom 4.2 Transcript of Ms. Gomez’s first narrative in spell 4.3 Transcript of Alice’s narrative, the second in the spell 4.4 Transcript of Ms. Gomez’s second narrative, the third in the spell 5.1 Ethel’s ‘He just gets it’ narratives 5.2 Mary’s ‘You’re gonna DI::E of this!’ narrative 5.3 Louise’s driving narrative 6.1 Front cover of the Open Disclosure Standard in 2003 6.2 Cover of a brochure on open disclosure 7.1 Genetic inheritance exhibit 7.2 Modes of representation 7.3 Interactive mechanical wheel 7.4 Software interface vii

32

35 39

42

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65 66 67 70 71 85 89 97 99 120 125 131 149 150 161 162 162 166

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List of Figures

7.5 Students concurrently using talk, gesture, graphics, and text 7.6 Images, gestures, and talk 7.7 Reflexivity of gesture, talk, and meaning 8.1 A conceptual diagram of semiotic remediation 8.2 A diagram of the relationships between, and primary concerns of, seven members (A, B, C, F, G, K, X) of the CEC 8.3 Page one of the bullseye flier (Note that some text has been masked to limit the identifiability of participants, individuals, and organizations) 8.4 Page two of the bullseye flier (Note that some text has been masked to limit the identifiability of participants, individuals, and organizations) 9.1 Screen capture of IO 9.2 Whiteboard and screen architectures (February 27) 9.3 Continuing whiteboard interactions (February 27 continued) 9.4 Annotating a drawing (February 27 continued) 9.5 Revisiting the template and database (September 14) 9.6 Aligning around the paper template (September 14 continued) 9.7 Examining the interface (November 2) 9.8 Realigning the template (November 2 continued)

169 175 177 190

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200 212 216 217 218 220 221 224 225

Preface

The cover of this book represents a quilt that a friend, Kent Williams, made. When the quilt was accepted for exhibition in a touring show of art quilts, Quilt National 2007, Kent wrote the following to describe it: Every August, I spend a week at a cottage on Saginaw Bay near Caseville, Michigan. And, although this quilt began as a purely abstract exercise – using horizontal bands to form a composition – it has come to represent the feeling I often get as the last rays of light splinter into colors so rich and various that you almost lose your breath. Another day is gone – another summer too.1 Kent’s quilt–bay–cottage experience is nicely captured in the name he gave the work: Caseville, August 3, 8:53 pm. We happened on the idea of using an image of this quilt for the cover of the book late in the process. The way varied fabrics are cut up, arranged into a pattern, and stitched together; the way that pattern is seen in different contexts by audiences; and the way the quilt gets represented (as it was in a catalog of quilts from the show, as it is in the photographic image that was the basis for the cover, as it is on the multiple material covers of this book, as it is here in our words) illustrate the pervasiveness of the piecing together we refer to as semiotic remediation. Kent’s comments about the quilt also nicely capture another key point of semiotic remediation – as the historical production of the quilt was not simply about sewing together material. Along the way, this production process became imbued with history, a history of what was happening (particularly in the local environment of the cottage on Saginaw Bay, a cottage we have also visited), but also a history rich with affective resonances, a history where what was stitched together was also Kent’s identities and social relations with a group of people who supported his quilting. The original intent was not to represent a sunset on the bay, and what the quilt came to mean emerged out of this wider history of its production. In that circumference, trajectories of learning were also implicated. Kent has worked mainly as a writer and movie critic. He began making quilts as another means of artistic expression and as another dimension of a long friendship with our neighbor, Nancy Fisher, a fabric artist. Kent’s ix

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Preface

initial involvements were peripheral, watching Nancy work, helping out in small ways. As Kent became more deeply involved, Nancy noted that at first he came up with designs that were not possible to sew, that he had to learn the affordances of the materials and of the technologies of sewing. Caseville, August 3, 8:53 pm marked an important passage in this trajectory of learning. After working together with Nancy on a number of quilts, Caseville was one of the first quilts Kent made largely on his own. Its acceptance by a prestigious art quilt show and its publication in their catalog was, thus, a rewarding milestone in Kent’s quilt-making. Here again the notion of semiotic remediation is relevant as it focuses on how the layering together of signs from different communicative fabrics entails also the ongoing processes of individual learning and social formation. The earliest threads of this book took shape in our undergraduate studies as we began to explore the complexity and richness of communication and learning, and particularly in our early engagements with theories of semiotics, sociocultural theory, and nonverbal communication through the work of such scholars as Thomas Sebeok, Umberto Eco, Erving Goffman, Gregory Bateson, and Ray Birdwhistell. Over the years, those early influences shaped the way we saw, understood, and discussed our experiences as we studied other languages, lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, taught English as a second language, observed our daughters as they grew up, and undertook our own research on learning and discourse. In the 1990s, these interests and experiences began to converge around the dialogic theories of Voloshinov and Bakhtin; related work in anthropological linguistics (such as that of William Hanks, Judith Irvine, and John Haviland), sociology (particularly that of Erving Goffman), and genre studies (particularly those of Charles Bazerman, Carolyn Miller, Carol Berkenkotter, and George Kamberelis); and sociocultural, often Vygotskyan, approaches to learning (including the works of James Wertsch, Barbara Rogoff, Peggy Miller, Michael Cole, Yrjo Engeström, Jean Lave, and Dorothy Holland). These engagements deepened as Julie became interested in analyzing reported speech in data she had collected on the communicative practices of individuals with aphasia and their routine communication partners while Paul was working with Jody Shipka and Kevin Roozen to consider the dialogic character of embodied literate and multimodal performances in their studies. That convergence led to an article ‘I’ll be the sun’: From reported speech to semiotic remediation practices,’ co-authored with Jody and Kevin, in Text and Talk in 2006, a collaboration and a set of ideas that sparked our interest in extending this framework in our work, in collaborating

Preface

xi

again with Jody and Kevin (who have contributed chapters here), and in engaging with other scholars from different disciplines around these ideas. The notion of semiotic remediation has become for us another part of the way we experience not only data from our research designs, but also our everyday experiences. Any project of this type requires more thanks than we can state here. To the many people who along the way have shaped our thinking and supported our work we are deeply grateful. Here we will single out a few people particularly key to this book. First, we thank the contributors for agreeing to engage in this collaborative task and for offering such excellent chapters for this volume. We also wish to acknowledge the insightful responses and valuable editing assistance offered by four outstanding graduate students: Jessica Bannon, Patrick Berry, Cory Holding, and Samantha Looker. Finally, we wish to thank our daughters, Nora and Anna, for all that we have learned from them, for all their support throughout our work on this project, and most of all for the joy and meaning that they have stitched into the fabric of our lives. PAUL A. PRIOR AND JULIE A. HENGST Champaign, Illinois March 4, 2009

Note 1. Kent’s statement, along with a photograph of his quilt, appeared in a catalog of the show: Quilt National 2007: the Best of Contemporary Quilts, co-produced by Lark Books and the Dairy Barn Cultural Arts Center; Lark Books, Asheville, NC, 2007.

Acknowledgment

Figure 8.2 is reprinted from Jeffrey T. Grabill (2007), Writing Community Change: Designing Technologies for Citizen Action. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press (New Dimensions in Computers and Composition). Reprinted with the permission of Hampton Press.

xii


Stuart Blythe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and American Culture at Michigan State University. Through a series of individual and collaborative projects, he has theorized and studied ways that individuals find agency in complex organizations and technologically mediated situations. His work has appeared in such journals as College Composition and Communication, Computers and Composition, the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Works and Days, and various edited collections. Jeffrey T. Grabill is Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Writing and Co-Director of the Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center at Michigan State University. He is interested in the knowledge work of citizens, users, workers, and students within organizational contexts. Grabill has published two books on community literacy and knowledge work, Community Literacy Programs and the Politics of Change (2001) and Writing Community Change: Designing Technologies for Citizen Action (2007), as well as articles in journals such as College Composition and Communication, Technical Communication Quarterly, Computers and Composition, and English Education. Julie A. Hengst is an Associate Professor of Speech and Hearing Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Grounded in sociocultural perspectives, her research program focuses on examining the ongoing reorganization of communication practices among individuals with acquired cognitive–linguistic disorders (such as aphasia and amnesia) and their routine communication partners. Recently, she has begun to translate these theoretical frameworks and empirical findings into clinical approaches with particular attention on the role of the clinician in successful communicative interventions. Her work has been published in the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research; Topics in Language Disorders; Aphasiology; Nature Neuroscience; Text and Talk; World Englishes; Social Development and edited collections. Rick Iedema is Professor of Communication and Director of the Centre for Health Communication in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney. He publishes his organizational xiii

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and communication research in journals including Organization Studies, Social Science and Medicine, British Medical Journal, Communication and Medicine, Discourse and Society, Text and Visual Communication. He has also published chapters in books on organization studies, (socio)linguistics, critical management studies and discourse analysis. In addition to his 2003 book, Discourses of Post-Bureaucratic Organization, he has published three edited volumes: The Discourse of Hospital Communication (2007); (with Carmen Caldas-Coulthard) Identity Trouble (2008) and (with Ros Sorensen) Managing Clinical Processes in Health Care (2008). Judith T. Irvine is Edward Sapir Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, where she has also served as chair of the Department of Anthropology. She has conducted ethnographic and sociolinguistic research in Senegal, principally in Wolof communities, as well as linguistic and historical research on other African regions. Recent themes of her work have included language ideology, sociolinguistic style and stance, language mapping (ideological and semiotic aspects), and critical examination of the concept of ‘ethnolinguistic group.’ A former editor of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, she has also edited some previously unpublished works by Edward Sapir, including the book The Psychology of Culture. Mary M. Juzwik is an Assistant Professor of Language and Literacy in the Teacher Education Department at Michigan State University, where she is affiliated with the Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures Program. Her work has been published in journals including American Educational Research Journal, College Composition and Communication, Educational Researcher, English Education, English Journal, Linguistics and Education, Teachers College Record, and Written Communication. She has a forthcoming book, The Rhetoric of Teaching: Understanding the Dynamics of Holocaust Narratives in an English Classroom, and is coediting a second forthcoming book, Narrative Discourse Analysis and Teacher Education. Paul A. Prior is a Professor of English and the Center for Writing Studies and Associate Director of CWS at the University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign. Drawing on cultural–historical activity theory and dialogic semiotics, he has explored connections among writing, reading, talk, learning, and disciplinarity. His work has appeared in Written Communication, Research in the Teaching of English, Text and Talk, Kairos, Computers and Composition, Mind, Culture, and Activity, and TESOL Quarterly as well

Notes on the Contributors xv

as a number of book chapters. He has authored Writing/Disciplinarity: a Sociohistoric Account of Literate Activity in the Academy and co-edited with Charles Bazerman What Writing Does and How It Does It: an Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. Kevin Roozen is an Assistant Professor of English at Auburn University. Drawing on cultural–historical activity theory and methodology, his longitudinal ethnographic studies of literate development trace the sociohistoric and semiotic trajectories of actors and artifacts across multiple literate engagements. His work has appeared in Text and Talk: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse, and Communication Studies; Kairos: a Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; and the Journal of Basic Writing. His articles ‘From Journals to Journalism: Tracing Trajectories of Literate Development’ and ‘ “Fanfic-ing” English Studies: a Case Study Exploring the Interplay of Vernacular Literacies and Disciplinary Engagement’ are forthcoming in College Composition and Communication and Research in the Teaching of English. Barry Saferstein is a cognitive sociologist, who applies discourse analysis and ethnography to the study of interaction, authority, and understanding in organizational settings. He is a Professor in the Communication Department at California State University San Marcos. His current research examines the effects of professional cultures and technology on the development of understandings in clinical and educational settings. Journals in which his work has appeared include Social Problems, Discourse and Society, and the European Journal of Social Theory, which recently published his article, ‘Process Narratives, Grey Boxes, and Discourse Frameworks: Cognition, Interaction, and Constraint in Understanding Genetics and Medicine.’ His forthcoming book is Understanding and Interaction in Clinical and Educational Settings. He has also published chapters in books on cognitive science and research methods. Srikant Sarangi is Professor and Director of the Health Communication Research Centre at Cardiff University. His research interests are in discourse analysis and applied linguistics, language and identity in public life, and institutional/professional communication studies (including healthcare, social welfare, bureaucracy, and education). He is author or editor of six books and five journal special issues and has published over 100 journal articles and book chapters. He is the founding editor of Communication & Medicine and (with Christopher Candlin) of Journal of Applied Linguistics as well as editor of Text and Talk: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse and Communication Studies.

xvi Notes on the Contributors

He is also general editor (with Candlin) of two book series: Studies in Applied Linguistics and Studies in Language and Communication. Jody Shipka is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is currently working on a book-length project, A Curious Discomfort: Toward an Activity-Based Multimodal Theory of Composing, that articulates a theory of composing as goal-oriented, mediated, multimodal, and embodied activity. Her work on remediating rhetoric and composition has appeared in articles in College Composition and Communication; Computers and Composition; Kairos: a Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; and Text and Talk.

1 Introduction: Exploring Semiotic Remediation Paul A. Prior and Julie A. Hengst University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Exploring Semiotic Remediation as Discourse Practice offers a new synthesis of current (and sometimes long-established) theoretical and research trajectories, arguing for a fully realized dialogic approach to semiotic practices-in-the-world. Taking up semiotic remediation as practice draws attention to ‘the diverse ways that humans’ and nonhumans’ semiotic performances (historical or imagined) are re-represented and reused across modes, media, and chains of activity’ (Prior, Hengst, Roozen, and Shipka, 2006, p. 734). For current studies of language, discourse, literacy, new media, and sociocultural activity, the key terms in the title of this volume – semiotic, remediation, and discourse practice – represent an argument for particular ways to address a pressing question: How do we understand semiotics/multimodality theoretically and investigate it methodologically? We have chosen semiotic rather than multimodal because semiotic signals our broad interest in signs across modes, media, channels, and so on, whereas multimodal depends on a definition of mode, which has not yet been clarified in the literature and seems to suggest exclusions (mode, for example, as opposed to medium). Remediation points to ways that activity is (re)mediated – not mediated anew in each act – through taking up the materials at hand, putting them to present use, and thereby producing altered conditions for future action. A focus on discourse practice is critical because semiotic remediation is at the heart of sociogenesis (the people-, artifact-, and society-making dimensions of all activity) as well as of situated discourse (that is, discourse situated both in concrete, historical acts and across extended trajectories). This approach is informed by multiple lines of scholarship that highlight chains of media and chains of mediation in social practices, including Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) notion of remediation (transformations across media); Latour’s (1999, 2005) account 1


of technical mediation in actor–network theory; recent articulations of mediated discourse analysis (Norris and Jones, 2005; Scollon, 2001; Scollon and Scollon, 2003, 2004); Linell’s (1998) notion of recontextualization; Iedema’s (2001, 2003b) analyses of resemiotization; Hutchins’ (1995) description of distributed cognition as ‘propagation of representation across representational media’ (p. 118); Fairclough’s (1992, 2003) attention to intertextual and interdiscursive chains; work on genres linked in sets or systems (Bazerman, 1994; Bazerman and Prior, 2005; Devitt, 1991, 2004; Swales, 2004); anthropological studies of dialogic discourse practices (Agha, 2007; Hanks, 1996a, 2001; Irvine, 1996; Keane, 1997; Silverstein, 1993, 2003, 2005); and studies of mediated activity (Cole, 1996; Valsiner and Rosa, 2007; Wertsch, 1991) derived from Vygotksy’s work. Semiotic remediation as practice then is fundamental to understanding the work of culture as well as communication; it calls on us to attend to the diverse ways that semiotic performances are re-represented and reused across modes, media, and chains of activity. The multidisciplinary contributors (representing writing studies, speech and hearing sciences, communication studies, applied linguistics, and education) in Exploring Semiotic Remediation as Discourse Practice articulate diverse theoretical perspectives that support the study of semiotic remediation practices while also offering case studies that investigate semiotic remediation and discourse practice in innovative ways. The chapters are designed to combine rich theoretical frameworks and methodological tools with close analyses of situated activity, to highlight how semiotic remediation operates in human lifeworlds. Overall, this collection details ways of going beyond analysis of multimodal artifacts to take up semiotic remediation as practice. In this introduction, we unpack some dimensions of the key theoretical terms of this approach, suggest the kind of methodological implications this framework entails, introduce the individual chapters in relation to this framework, and conclude by considering some future agendas (theoretical and empirical) that flow from a focus on semiotic remediation.

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Frameworks for a dialogic semiotics The work of Voloshinov (1973, 1976), Bakhtin (1981, 1986), and their circle (for example, Bakhtin and Medvedev, 1978) produced the key dialogic insight: language and signs need to be understood as concrete, historical, situated, and social phenomena rather than as abstract,

10.1057/9780230250628 - Exploring Semiotic Remediation as Discourse Practice, Edited by Paul A. Prior and Julie A. Hengst

depersonalized, and unsituated systems. They signaled this shift in part by contrasting the usual units of language to notions of speech – contrasting linguist’s sentences, for example, to people’s situated utterances. The sentence in linguistics has typically been represented as having no concrete speaker and situation; it is supposed to be simply a string produced using the lexical resources of a language in accordance with its rules for combining and ordering. Voloshinov and Bakhtin defined an utterance as the combination of what is historically produced by an embodied, interested person in a meaningful situation and what is interpreted actively and responsively by those who receive it. Their dialogic insight has had far-reaching implications for theories of discourse. For example, when Voloshinov (1973) examined reported speech in the 1920s, he challenged the received notions of direct and indirect reported speech, pointing to free indirect, quasi-direct, and other subtle means by which representations of talk, text, thought, and stance seep around and through the putative borders of reported speech – through the framed (he said, she said), syntactically signaled (by, for example, tense shifting), lexically realized (as register variation), and nonverbally highlighted (by gestural and paralinguistic cues in talk; quotation marks and other typographic–visual conventions in text) markers that signal listeners or readers that someone else’s words are being presented. He highlighted the typically unmarked ways that others’ words and signs are routinely but intricately woven into the very fabric of our utterances and acts. In the process, reported speech and the question of voicing – of who is talking – shift from being isolated, perhaps relatively rare issues of linguistic form to being one face of a central principle for using signs – the way we constantly take up others’ signs, use them, and to varying degrees make them our own (or not). Attention to how signs are used and how they are made one’s own opens up not only a broader, semiotic field of communication, but also the critical question of sociogenesis – a concept that unites individual learning and social formation as questions of situated and mediated practice. It is important to stress that Voloshinov and Bakhtin not only articulated dialogic activity as the ground for communication, but also as the site where people become who they are and where sociocultural formations (church, state, profession, class, social group) are constantly being made and remade. Although the notion of semiotic remediation we propose is very much in line with Voloshinov’s (1973) call for a dialogic theory of signs, his work, along with the more widely taken-up versions of Bakhtin (1981, 1986), have largely been applied to retheorize elements of language practice.


Paul A. Prior and Julie A. Hengst 3



Key scholars (such as Clark and Gerrig, 1990; Goffman, 1974, 1981; Hanks, 1990, 2001; Haviland, 1996; Irvine, 1996) have called for theories that address a family of semiotic phenomena (replays, demonstrations, indexicality, participation frameworks, reported speech, transpositions) in an integrated fashion. Working from Goffman’s (1974, 1981) analyses of complexly laminated and embedded frames and footings, Hanks (1990) argued that such diverse phenomena as ‘explicit quotation (direct speech), indirect report, “transposition” of deictic categories, certain kinds of highly creative reference, and the subtle shifts in perspective that can be seen to underlie much of deictic reference in connected discourse’ (p. 197) all depend on participation frameworks and indexical grounds being decentered from, and recentered in, the phenomenal here-and-now of interaction. Hanks (1990) and Irvine (1996) make the critical argument that these complex indexical framings of participation, context, and reference should lead not to an ever-expanding catalogue of categories (such as in Levinson, 1988, or Semino and Short, 2004), but more parsimoniously and flexibly to a small set of operations (such as decentering and recentering) that can generate very complicated semiotic effects. Irvine’s (1996) response to Levinson’s (1988) attempt to formalize participation roles by identifying a universal set of binary features (e.g. ± motive) succinctly identifies the theoretical problem of attempting to classify the complicated semiotic effects people can produce in diverse and ever-changing sociocultural situations: I believe that Levinson and others who would decompose Speaker and Addressee into a set of analytically primary components have got the analysis back-to-front. To focus on the role fragments, rather than the fragmentation process, reifies the fragments and, presumably, limits them to a finite number. Yet, one might well suspect that the number of such participant roles (PRs) arrived at by the decompositional approach may prove endless. (p. 134) Irvine (1996) offers compelling analyses of the complex semiotic effects of the fragmentation process, noting not only how layering of participation frameworks in multilingual interactions can produce complex representational transpositions, but also (in her analysis of Wolof wedding insults) how a present conversation or text is produced and understood through a finely tuned cultural and situated sense of its history of production and its anticipated forms of reception. She argues that past, present, and future shadow conversations suffuse the present


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interaction at hand and represent a critical resource for participants’ production and understanding of discourse. Taking a semiotic perspective, we suggest, would shift our attention from shadow conversations to, in effect, shadow acts, with talk representing only one dimension. On different grounds, Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) argued for the value of articulating multimodal principles (like chunking or perspective) rather than mode-specific theories of discourse (such as accounts of paragraphing grounded in certain textual genres as opposed to general accounts of chunking across modes). In a recent article (Prior et al., 2007), we and two other contributors to this volume, Kevin Roozen and Jody Shipka, reexamined the notion of reported speech (or represented speech and thought, or represented discourse). Drawing on theories of Goffman (1974, 1981), Clark and Gerrig (1990), Hanks (1990, 2001), and Irvine (1996) and focusing on case studies of three sites (a family pretend game, a college composition course task, and a comedy skit), our analyses examined not only how canonical examples of reported speech involved other semiotics (paralinguistics, gesture, dress, interactional formats), but also how people dialogically envoiced and embodied others (or copied material features of texts/objects) when they produced represented speech, thinking, and writing. We noted how intertextual and interdiscursive chains of signs routinely involved both transformations in media and multiple forms of mediation. In proposing the shift from a focus on reported speech to a focus on semiotic remediation practices, we aimed not simply to expand the range of ‘reported speech’ but to bring those discursive phenomena into the kind of broader semiotic framework that Hanks (1990) evoked. In other words, the concept of semiotic remediation practices is not intended as just a way to revise, or attend differently to, any single existing category of discourse. Semiotics has long wagered that general principles and patterns may be identified across modes, codes, and media, a wager recently rearticulated by researchers (see, for example, Bolter and Grusin, 1999; Kress, 1997; Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001; Lemke, 1998) alert to the multiple impacts of computer and communication technologies as they examine new media and transformations across modes and genres. However, much of this attention to multimodality in new media has so far addressed a narrow range of oppositions: print texts vs. electronic screens, language vs. the visual, critique vs. design. Multimodality has primarily been taken up as an issue of the composition of artifacts rather than engagement in processes, of representational forms rather than situated sociocultural practices (see Norris, 2004, for an exception). Texts on multimodality (for example, Baldry and Thibault, 2006;





Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, 2001) have provided valuable perspectives and observations, but have focused on multimodal objects rather than multimodality as situated activity. Attention to multimodal production and reception is limited; analysis of ‘reading,’ for example, does not examine the concrete practices of readers but rather infers these processes from the objects. Kress’s Literacy in the New Media Age (2003) is an example of a key text that fits this pattern. Van Leeuwen and Jewitt’s otherwise excellent Handbook of Visual Analysis (2001) includes only one chapter – Goodwin’s examination of practices of professional vision – that examines the visual as an issue of situated action. In spite of the growing attention to situated discourse practices and to theories that link communication with social practice, learning, and activity, strong links between multimodality and questions of situated learning, identity and social formation remain rare. Against this backdrop, Exploring Semiotic Remediation as Discourse Practice argues for an approach that is grounded in a dialogic understanding of semiotics, that focuses on the situated and mediated character of activity, and that recognizes the deep integration of semiotic mediation with the practices of everyday sociocultural life. As discursive practice operating in sociocultural worlds, semiotic remediation is closely tied to recent work on indexicality, indexical orders, and chronotopes (see Blommaert, 2005; Hanks, 1990; Prior and Shipka, 2003; Silverstein, 1993, 2003). Developing Bakhtin’s (1981) early discussions of chronotopes as embodied and represented space-times, a number of researchers (Leander, 2001; Lemke, 2005; Prior, 1998, Prior and Shipka, 2003; Silverstein, 2005) have articulated the centrality of the notion of chronotopes to understanding how participants in a moment of discourse routinely navigate multiple representational worlds or indexical fields on the one hand, and also how such situated interactions link to past and projected histories of representation. Although Pierce (1998) made clear that the three sign processes (iconic, indexical, and symbolic) are not mutually exclusive categories, understanding how these processes dialogically blend in interaction – how they operate across times and across quite different media – remains a theoretical challenge. Semiotic remediation thus represents a basic dialogic process that interdiscursively weaves together modes, media, genres, and events and serves as a foundation for indexical and chronotopic orders. Taking a dialogic approach to semiotics calls for attention to the range of semiotics that are present and consequential in interactions rather than taking single-mode analyses (of talk, of writing, of gesture, of visual image) as autonomous communicative domains. It also calls


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Remediation: chains, media(tions), and genres The notion of remediation focuses attention not only on the laminated (layered, fused, blended) heterogeneity of semiotic means that are simultaneously at play in any situated interaction, but also on the location of any interaction – and its convergence of particular tools, people, and environments – within historical trajectories that reach from past into present and project forward to near- and long-term futures. In terms of practices, semiotic remediation is fundamentally both synchronic and diachronic. Temporal chains of semiotic production, reception, representation, and distribution have been traced in several lines of research. Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) account of remediation explores, for example, how novels are transformed into movies that spin off video games that lead to web fanzines and branded product lines, a process sometimes referred to as repurposing. Bolter and Grusin argue that certain design logics – particularly the tension between a desire for transparent immersion and the value of very foregrounded and conscious hypermediation – operate across such diverse media as paintings, film, video games, and furniture. Their account of remediation focuses on questions of how to understand semiotic artifacts (material representation) that contain multiple semiotic modes (text and images, text and sound, and so forth) and on the implications of changing technologies of distribution (such as the internet); however, it does not attend to the many emergent remediations that occur in the situated production and reception of such artifacts. Multimodality has also been identified in the transformative trajectories of discourse across times and places, in intertextual chaining (Fairclough, 1992) that often involves shifts in mode and genre. Over the last 15 years, genre analysts have been shifting from a focus on genres as isolated phenomena to a recognition of how specific types of texts or types of textual performances are formed within, infused by, and constitutive of systems of genres. These systems of genres have been variously described in terms of chains (Fairclough, 2003; Swales, 2004), colonies (Bhatia, 2002), repertoires (Devitt, 2004; Orlikowski and Yates, 1994), sets and systems (Bazerman, 1994, 2004; Devitt, 1991, 2004), and


for understanding signs of all kinds as dialogic, not generated out of abstract systems, but drawn from a history of sign use, tuned to the present interaction, and oriented to future responses and acts. We argue it is now time to embrace Voloshinov’s original vision, to pursue a truly dialogic semiotics.



ecologies (Spinuzzi, 2004). Theorists have also begun to highlight ways that genre theory has privileged public texts whose primary functions are informational, rhetorical, or aesthetic. For example, Swales (2004) has identified the category of occluded genres (which are normally not public), and Spinuzzi (2004) has highlighted the way many workplace genres are designed primarily to mediate activity (to work, for example, as aids to thinking and action rather than as means of inter-office or external communication). Situated genre analyses in specific sites (see Bazerman, 1999; Berkenkotter, 2001; Kamberelis, 2001; Molle and Prior, 2008; Prior, 1998) have highlighted ways that literate activity involves multimodal chains of genres. For example, a group may engage in planning (which might include presentational and conversational talk as well as written notes, drawings, diagrams, and so on); that planning discourse may lead to a series of written drafts that are perhaps reviewed through a series of oral and written responses (with annotational genres including textual editing, marginal comments, and extended comments); and all of this activity may culminate in a final written text that is then read in certain typified ways and prompts other responses. Prior (1994, 1995, 1998), for example, traced chains of discourse across the talk and texts of a sociology group (graduate students and faculty in a seminar linked to a research project) as they co-produced institutional documents (examination papers and theses) as well as disciplinary texts (conference papers, technical reports, journal articles, book chapters). Likewise, Berkenkotter and Ravotas (1998) and Berkenkotter (2001) examined how the oral talk of a psychotherapy session was converted first into the therapist’s notes (including marked and unmarked direct representations of the client’s speech as well as implicit intertextual allusions to formal standardized categories of mental disease) and then those notes were further repurposed to produce case summaries and to submit claims for insurance payments. Their account of this recontextualization highlighted not only movements from talk to text, but also how the shifts in genres and discursive orders recategorized the client’s narratives of lived experience in terms of the formal diagnostic codes found in DSM-IV (the fourth edition of the manual of official diagnostic symptoms of mental illnesses). Bowker and Star (1999) have examined the pervasive and profound role such categorization schemes play in social organization. The genres in such chains of semiotic production are often both relatively occluded and more oriented to mediational or processual purposes of individuals or groups than to wider public exchange.


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Several lines of work have taken up chaining, not only of discourse across media but also of the whole range of material artifacts. Latour’s actor–network theory (ANT) and his research on science and technology have focused on the circulation of coordinated series of objects and representations. At the Salk Institute, Latour and Woolgar (1986) traced the ways brains were converted into purified chemical substances and then into graphic representations generated by measuring devices, representations that were re-represented in papers that were then cited and summarized in grant proposals. Their analyses focused on ways that the scientists coordinated these chains of inscription. Latour (1999) traced the way a stretch of rainforest in the Amazon was inscribed with posts and markers (overlaying the land with a coordinate geometry); the way soil in these grids was sampled and stored in a wood box that abstracted that geometry; and the way that the box was transported to a French laboratory, where the soil samples were analyzed and converted into numbers that were written up in a paper that was distributed in an issue of a journal. He argues that the structure of such chains challenges philosophical notions of a yawning referential chasm between things and words; instead, he documents specific practices of alignment as materials and signs are transformed across media, producing cascades of circulating reference marked by small gaps and quite modest leaps. Attending to chains of signs and materialities together has implications not only for the kind of epistemological questions that science studies has typically raised (as seen routinely in Latour’s work), but also for the relation of semiotics to things and to political economy across quite different social domains. Exploring the implications of understanding signs as multifunctional and meditating on the functions of Wolof griots (traditional bards), Irvine (1989) began to delineate the diverse ways that signs and objects, semiotics and political economy, may be linked: The verbal sign . . . relates to a political economy in many ways: by denoting it; by indexing parts of it; by depicting it (in Peircean terms, the iconic function, illustrated here in Wolof praise-singing); and by taking part in it as an object of exchange. These multiple functions may all co-occur, because they merely reflect the multifunctionality of language in general. Saussure’s segregation of sign-value from the world or material values is linked to his focus on only one of language’s functions – its role as a vehicle for referential communication. To acknowledge that language has many functions, and therefore




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This attention to the materiality of signs challenges the duality of sign and object. For semiotic remediation, it suggests attention to trajectories of material and discursive transformation. Irvine’s call for more complex renderings of the value of signs is well illustrated in Keane’s (1997) analyses of representational practices among the Anakalangese people of Indonesia, with particular attention to how ritual action and kinship relations were accomplished through events where the exchange of words and the exchange of objects (food, metals, cloths, tools, animals, ancestral valuables) had to flow together for success and where disruptions to either could lead to hazard and conflict. Looking at bureaucratic practices, Iedema (2001, 2003a, b) traced the way a hospital renovation project was worked out not only over a series of interactions in talk, text, and drawings, but also through object-production (from texts and drawings to architect’s models all the way to a full building on a specific site). Iedema’s conceptualization of resemiotization integrates all these chained (re)materializations into a single historical trajectory. In analyzing the complex chains of rhetorical, material, economic, promotional, scientific, legal, and illegal activity that Thomas Edison performed as he pursued the electrification of everyday life, Bazerman (1999) proposes the notion of heterogeneous symbolic engineering to capture the dense interpenetration of symbolic, social, and material strategies in this history. Attention to remediation calls for careful tracing of semiotic activity across chains and for a subtle and precise vocabulary for practices of alignment as well as processes of transformation across media, genres, and events. What is critical in the last set of approaches we have discussed (those of Irvine, Keane, Iedema, Latour, and Bazerman) is the full integration of signs, people, material, and activity into a single coherent framework and into continuous (if heterogeneous) historical trajectories.


that signs relate to the material world in many ways, including as objects of exchange, is important to understanding language’s role in a political economy. (p. 263)

Discourse practice and sociogenesis Practices are marked by repeatability and recognizability, a notion Bourdieu (1990) characterizes in terms of habitus – embodied ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed



This durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisation is a practical sense which reactivates the sense objectified in institutions. . . . the habitus, which is constituted in the course of an individual history, imposing its particular logic on incorporation, and through which agents partake of the history objectified in institutions, is what makes it possible to inhabit institutions, to appropriate them practically, and so to keep them in activity, pulling them from the state of dead letters, reviving the sense deposited in them, but at the same time imposing the revisions and transformations that reactivation entails. (p. 57) However, he also highlights the game-like character of practice as experienced by people immersed in uncertain, temporally unfolding action in concrete settings. Much as discourse is always new but contextualized and contextualizing (or presupposing and entailing), practice too involves the weight of trajectories of history, the emergent qualities of the immediate situation, and the disruptive spark of future goal orientations. Practice, like dialogic approaches to discourse in general, then needs a theory of connection that accounts for the re-, for what makes something a re-petition, a re-cognition, a re-play, a re-presentation, a re-use. A re cannot be re- because it involves simple relations of identity (that is, because it is the same thing again); instead, the relations that we define as re-, very like those that Silverstein (2005) interrogates as co- (for example, co-text), must emerge from some mix of indexical, iconic, and/or tropic mappings between events or between entities. Miller and Goodnow (1995) define practice succinctly as ‘actions that are repeated, shared with others in a social group, and invested with normative expectations and with meanings or significances that go beyond the immediate goals of the actions’ (p. 7). As developmental psychologists, they approach notions of practice and activity with a particular interest in ‘describing development-in-context, without separating child and context and without separating development into a variety of separate domains’ (p. 8). Their synthesis takes up notions of practice as a site of social and moral order, emphasizing the ways ongoing participation (see Lave and Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1990) in practice transforms both people and practices themselves. It locates practices in histories


to function as structuring structures, . . . principles which generate and organize practices and representations’ that arise in navigating the repeated territory of everyday life (p. 53). Bourdieu goes on to note:



and emphasizes the consequential nature of participation for practice (‘development may be regarded as the tightening or the recontextualization of situation-bound understandings,’ p. 13). Taking a practice perspective, Wortham (2006) offers an in-depth analysis of how several students’ identities were shaped by repeated engagement in mundane, fleeting discourse practices in certain kinds of classroom discussions. The repeated, recurrent, historically dense character of social practice makes it a kind of web that works to both channel and support development. Hanks’ (1996b) articulation of a practice approach to discourse centers around the notions of communicative practices and discourse genres. Drawing especially on Bourdieu and Bakhtin but also a range of anthropological and phenomenological approaches, Hanks emphasizes the plurifunctionality of discourse, the interpenetration of ‘language and the world of human experience’ (p. 236) as people inhabit the world communicatively (rather than simply represent it linguistically). He points to the power of Bourdieu’s habitus, as it accounts for discursive regularities in terms of dispositional habits built by routine rather than relying on a priori shared rules. The dispositional dimension of habitus, he notes, ‘is perspectivally centered rather than projecting into action the view-from-nowhere common to rule-based systems’ (p. 239). He proposes discourse genres as a unit of analysis for approaching communicative practice and notes their fundamentally indexical character: How a type of practice articulates with its setting differs from the casual ellipsis of everyday conversation to the elaborate presence of the court, the examination room, the legislative assembly, and the place of religious observance, as all are spaces whose social values are inscribed upon the practices that take place in them. This inscription may be evident in the words, syntax, or discourse organization of talk or in dress codes, body practices, the rights to speak, the requirement of silence, and so forth. The important point is that elements of the practice genre systematically index its linkage to the space of engagement. (Hanks, 1996b, p. 245)


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Although flexible and emergent, discourse genres also highlight the weight of deeply furrowed and semiotically diverse routines not only in producing immediate phenomenological social orders, but also in providing a matrix for enculturation of social practice (as individuals appropriate and reactivate practices and transform them in appropriation and use).


The approach to discourse practices that we take here shares many tenets with emerging work on mediated discourse analysis (Norris, 2004; Norris and Jones, 2005; Scollon, 2001; Scollon and Scollon, 2003, 2004). Scollon (2001) argues that discourse analysis should begin with the mediated activity of individuals in situated sites of engagement, but should view such sites always as linked to broader histories of practice and to the historical production of mediational means. To capture the hybrid, laminated quality that emerges when multiple histories are tied together in situated actions, he proposes the nexus of practice as something akin to Bourdieu’s (1990) habitus – as a thickening and stabilizing of a site of engagement and a constellation of social practices through repeated cycles of semiosis and action over time and space, what Scollon (2008) comes to call discourse itineraries. Scollon (2005) illustrates this theoretical approach through reflections on laying a hardwood floor. He notes how a professional had resemiotized his work experience by writing a book on laying floors, how Scollon and his wife then read and talked through the book (text and images) as they first decided whether to lay a floor, then ordered the wood, and finally with another family member laid it, all the while engaging in multiple resemiotizations of the book’s text and pictures as well as multiple instances of resemiotizing earlier talk and material action. Scollon and Scollon (2004) also highlight the way that tracing trajectories of people, signs, objects, and actions involves attention to how scales of time interact (Lemke, 2000). Finally, the co-production of people and practice is central to mediated discourse analysis as seen in Scollon’s (2001) account of the ontogenesis of handing – that is, the ways people learn how objects are handed and received, with what kinds of semiotic gestures and sometimes accompanying talk or textual exchange. The ontogenesis of handing, its repeated but varied practices (a parent handing objects to a baby, a child sharing toys with a sibling at home, a professor buying coffee at Starbucks, a political group handing out literature on Hong Kong streets), calls attention to the ways people learn very specific practices (including the identities, affects, motives, and means associated with them) that get redeployed across sites of engagement and fused into broader practices. Scollon’s close analysis of the ontogenesis of handing offers a striking meditation on how one family of re-relations is constituted in practice, on how different episodes of handing are sociogenetically linked. Work on mediated discourse analysis has attended admirably to discourse as action, to chains of discourse across modes and media, and to sociogenetic dimensions of communicative practice.





In seeing social interaction as the locus for human development, Voloshinov’s and Bakhtin’s theories align well with the rich, generative work in psychology of their contemporary, Vygotsky (1987). Linking these two lines of scholarship decades later, Wertsch (1991) argued that the question ‘Who’s talking?’ is central to exploring and understanding links between semiotic mediation and learning – that is, to the historical co-production of people and society as others’ utterances and signs are appropriated into sociocognitive systems (memory, attention, selfregulation), personalized, (re)externalized, and hence (re)woven into the fabric of social voices, practices, and identities. We would argue, however, that a more comprehensive view of that historical co-production of people and society is offered by the question ‘Who’s acting and making?’ – which points to fully embodied semiotics in the world, not only talk. Theories of mediated and distributed activity (see Cole and Engeström, 1993; del Rio and Alvarez, 1995; Hutchins, 1995; Wertsch, 1991, 1998) highlight the critical place of material–semiotic artifacts such as hammers, languages, computers, narratives, and interpretable texts, in the (re)production of society and the development of individuals. As Wertsch (1991) notes, mediated activity offers a unit of analysis that integrates the social and psychological, the situated and the historical. Mediation also entails distribution, the ways use of an artifact here-and-now by particular participants draws in the activity of other participants at other times and places, producing a kind of chronotopic lamination – a fusion (fleeting or stabilized) of multiple times, places, and people (see Prior, 1998; Prior and Shipka, 2003). Analyzing the practices of ‘taking a fix’ (that is, fixing the location and track of a ship) on naval vessels, Hutchins (1995) reflected on the heterochronicity of these practices: The computation of the present fix relies on the most recent setting of the hoey, which was done a few seconds ago. The present computation also involves the projection of the dead-reckoning position, a piece of work that was done just a few tens of seconds ago; on the tide graphs that were constructed a few hours ago; on the changes to the chart that were plotted a few days ago; on the projected track and the turning bearings, which were laid down when this chart was ‘dressed’ a few weeks ago; on the placement of the symbols on this chart, which was done upon publication of the new chart issue a few years ago; on the nature of the plotting tools, which were designed a few decades ago; on the mathematics of the projection of the chart,


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Heterochronicity and heterogeneity flow from such layered, embedded mediation. Hutchins (1995) describes distributed cognition as the coordinated, transformative ‘propagation of representational state across representational media’ (p. 118). He notes how each medium in these distributed processes, including human brains and bodies, has particular properties that are adaptively recruited and reconstituted in particular functional systems – fleeting or stabilized ensembles of people, artifacts, practices, and environments that are being coordinated around some end(s). Discourse practice needs to be understood as historically unfolding relationships among externalized, interiorized, and embedded forms of mediation. Vygotsky (1997b) noted that ‘every function in the cultural development of the child appears on the stage twice’ (p. 106), first on the social plane, between people, and then on the psychological plane, within the person. In his account of sociogenesis, Vygotsky (1987) presented the dynamic transformations – from thought to language and language to thought – that drive and define psychological development as fundamentally an issue of semiotic remediation. Discussing the different semiotic properties of language and thought, he wrote: Thought does not consist of individual words like speech. I may want to express the thought that I saw a barefoot boy in a blue shirt running down the street today. I do not, however, see separately the boy, the shirt, the fact that the shirt was blue, the fact that the boy ran, the fact that the boy was without shoes. I see all this together in a unified act of thought. In speech, however, the thought is partitioned into separate words . . . . What is contained simultaneously in thought unfolds sequentially in speech. Thought can be compared to a hovering cloud which gushes a shower of words. (p. 281)


which was worked out a few centuries ago; and on the organization of the sexagesimal number system, which was developed a few millennia ago. (pp. 167–8)

Beyond the representational shift from holistic and multisensory interior semiotics to linear–verbal externalized semiotics, Vygotsky was also concerned with sense, with the affective and motivational dimensions of consciousness, with what Voloshinov (1973) identified as socioideological tone and evaluative orientation: ‘Any apprehension, after all,



must have inner speech, inner intonation, and the rudiments of inner style: one can apprehend one’s hunger apologetically, irritably, angrily, indignantly, etc.’ (p. 87). Consider, for example, the difference it makes if the barefoot boy is celebrating with abandon a beautiful summer day, evoking perhaps a complex mix of joy and nostalgia, or is a starving and ragged child running from soldiers and explosions, producing quite different emotions and motives for action. These semiotic transformations between thought and externalized signs, particularly when linked to the place of sense in consciousness, point again to a dialogic semiotics. From a sociogenetic perspective, the re- dimensions of discourse practices make them a centripetal force in the dialogic production of the recognizable, not only recognizable forms of communication, but also the recognizable character of persons, the recognizable shape of social formations. The challenge here is how to account for re-, how to understand ‘repeated’ not as a relation between identical events or entities, but as an effect of complex blends of indexicality, iconicity, and tropic projection. Only with a firmer account of re- and co- relations will the semiotic recirculation of discourse practices across embodied action, material artifacts, and inner experience present for us a fully integrated framework for understanding individual and social development, the constitution of sociocultural orders, and the everyday working out of situated, mediated activity.

Methodological implications Semiotic remediation as discourse practice draws together diverse phenomena around a basic set of semiotic operations and is attuned to the situated and sociogenetic dimensions of everyday activity and discourse. It aims to reach from the fleeting worlds of inner semiosis to long, historical chains of material activity in the world. In certain respects, the methodological tools for analysis of semiotic remediation have been developed in approaches that examine discourse, visual, and other sign systems and that study human activity.1 Exploring Semiotic Remediation as Discourse Practice calls for the same methodological toolkit that these related approaches use: basically a combination of ethnographic methods of data collection (observation, interview, recording of activity, collection of texts and artifacts) with interpretive forms of analysis (triangulation; close reading; grounded theorizing; data reduction by coding; data manipulations by rearrangement, isolation, and recontextualization; reflexivity). Without underestimating the challenges to


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employing such tools (and the chapters in this volume represent different scholars’ solutions to some of these challenges), we see the central methodological issue much in the terms Vygotsky articulated it, as a question of theory–method linkages. Vygotsky (1997a) identified the crisis in the psychological work of his era as essentially a problem of theoretical motivation, selection, and framing. He argued that research needed to be guided by a strong, deep theoretical framework that would be tightly aligned to congruent objects and methods of inquiry, and that would be guided by social needs as well as by a desire for growth in knowledge. Looking at psychology five decades later, Bruner (1990) highlighted the continuing ways fragmentation and narrow specialization were producing studies that were ‘less and less exportable,’ sealed ‘within their own rhetoric and within their own parish of authorities’ (p. ix). Likewise, a virtuoso technical analysis of certain dimensions of a situated interaction that is not guided by a coherent, broader framework for understanding human practices and their re-emergence over time and place will end up being just a tile in a mosaic that has no pattern guiding the placement of its pieces. As a number of scholars (see Cicourel, 1981, 1992; Goffman, 1981; Silverstein, 2003, 2005) have noted, the particular methodological principles of the school of conversation analysis (as in Schegloff, 1996), which have been designed to attend to sequential adjacency pairs in face-to-face talk as though they were autonomous social and linguistic worlds, represent a prime example of an approach that in principle attends to whatever tile a researcher happens to hit upon and ignores any other dimension, contextualization, or consequence of situated activity. Without an overarching and integrated theory that links semiotics, individual action and development, and sociocultural phenomena, studies of social practice and situated discourse risk producing a fairly random mosaic; even if the painted tiles are beautiful, they tend to not add up to much or to be well designed for creating a more coherent picture. In our own reading of varied literatures, another kind of methodological problem is also visible – that of theories that outstrip their implementation in research designs, often with little or no apparent recognition of the disconnect. This phenomenon may emerge because social and practical motivations end up defining objects of inquiry in ways that borrow heavily from everyday categories and that fail to interrogate those categories. It may also emerge because of a reliance on familiar methods or a conventional set of disciplinary problems. A method and problem set may define rigor in narrow terms or simply





offer such a sophisticated, complex, and seemingly comprehensive array of analytic concepts and moves that it becomes easy to ignore whatever falls outside their bright spotlight. The lack of attention to literate practices and artifacts in so many otherwise sophisticated, situated studies is one example of this kind of disconnect between theory and methodology. For example, Mertz (2007) offers a remarkably rich ethnographic account of legal enculturation centered in law school classrooms. She attends to how legal cases are recontextualized in classroom talk-ininteraction, how such recontextualizations index the reading of legal cases, and how this enculturation produces a very specialized ideology of certain genres of text-artifacts. Yet the role of writing-as-activity, of student writing in particular, is almost invisible. Mertz’s discussion of methodology focuses on the basic toolkit for linguistic anthropology (means of collecting and analyzing talk, of engaging in observation, and of conducting interviews); however, collection of texts, especially student texts (whether notes written at home or examination questions), much less investigation of writing processes, is not on the table. We cite this example because it is so striking to one of us (Prior) whose work has explored disciplinary socialization in graduate education, but also because Mertz’s theoretical sophistication, the rigor of the methods she employs, and the depth of her ethnographic engagements (as insider and researcher) in legal discourse practices make the absence of attention to writing in effect an example of the steep challenges we are noting here. Recognition of the pervasive heterogeneity of semiotics, the tracing of chronotopic networks spread across space and time, close attention to how co- and re- relations are forged, the integration of semiotic and material trajectories in activity, all work against the dominant grain of studies that have defined sites of inquiry by their named placement on existing sociocultural maps and have identified objects of inquiry by the taken-for-grantedness of their forms. The alignment of theory and method is a constant challenge for us all, one that calls for reflexive interrogation of our own designs. In that sense, semiotic remediation as discourse practice has implications for the motivation of inquiry, for selection of sites and methods, and for the deployment of methods and means of analysis. It argues that studies should attend to the semiotics that are in (inter)action, not to some predetermined set. Responding to a set of studies of narrative in a special issue of Text and Talk, Haviland (2008) notes the lack of fuller semiotics (and a certain looseness with form itself) as a central limitation of the studies:


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First, a complaint: utterances are not only multifunctional, but also multimodal. In these for the most audio-only narrative studies, with data usually in English or presented in free English gloss, one often feels that formal interactive elements may be rendered invisible by design. Ochs (1979) pointed out decades ago that when our data are reduced to the transcripts we use, we must be especially careful how we choose to transcribe. Is there only one possible standard of transcriptional detail? Does the original language matter? Can we somehow read the Italian through an English gloss? Or interpret significant visible action through a desultory textual paraphrase? (p. 443) If a particular semiotic is going to be a focus (and we recognize the potential value of such focused attention), then it should be clear why and how the semiotic range has been so narrowed. In other words, the narrowing should be reflexive, relatively explicit (recognizing there are limits even to delineating limits), and balanced by appropriate qualification of findings. To explore semiotic remediation, researchers should recognize the simultaneous, layered deployment of multiple semiotics (talk, gesture, artifact use and production, interaction with environmental structure): people are never just talking, just reading, just writing. It also means that researchers should look at semiotic trajectories and chains across time and place, recognizing both the need to understand semiotics as dispersed and mediated and the value of tracing out mediations ANT-like, rhizomatically, across situated functional systems. Semiotic remediation as practice also foregrounds that the twinned processes of learning and social formation are ubiquitous dimensions of practice, a point nicely articulated by Lave and Wenger (1991). Discussing the question of linguistic relativity through the lens of analyzing deictics in Mayan, Hanks (1993) observed: ‘Rather than asking what speakers of a given language can think because of the categories of their language, the real question is what they routinely do think, because of the contours of their practices’ (p. 266). Heterogeneity, agency and emergence/learning mean that action is never simply the outcome of some sociocultural algorithm, that local here-and-now sites are never autonomous domains, and that whatever phenomena are seen in a particular situated stretch of activity should not be translated into a rule for action/discourse in that situation. Finally, the framework of semiotic remediation as discourse practice needs to be applied reflexively to the work of theory and research. It





should inform how we understand our own construal of problems, the semiotic practices of our research inquiry, the way that research is represented in reports, and the way research is linked to the identities and social contextualizations of all participants (ourselves included). In all these senses, our hope is that exploring semiotic remediation as a discourse practice will pose problem spaces for sociocultural researchers that motivate strong but expansive theoretical frameworks for research, frameworks that are closely and reflexively aligned to units of analysis and methods of inquiry. Thus, we hope, our growing sense of the sheer complexity of human-activity-in-the-world may be matched by a corresponding sophistication in the design, analysis, and presentation of our observations.

An interdisciplinary collection exploring semiotic remediation The chapters of this collection take up semiotic remediation across a wide range of settings and through particular methodological lenses well fitted to those settings. Through close attention to the discourse practices of university students, Kevin Roozen (Chapter 2) and Jody Shipka (Chapter 3) challenge institutionally bounded notions of school and school learning as well as narrow linguistic notions of writing. Roozen offers a fine-grained analysis of trajectories of practice and dialogic remediation, following an undergraduate student as he links school and nonschool literate activities: studying mathematics, producing and performing sketch comedy, writing content for a role-playing game, and teaching math. Shipka analyzes the mediated, distributed, embodied, and affective dimensions of composing processes as students in a college composition course undertake a task that requires them to remediate print-based texts, a task that ultimately leads them to design, orchestrate, and represent a two-day, multisite rhetorical event with original music, handwritten texts, images, video, a live ‘coffee house’ performance, and a learning tour. Focusing on narrative as forms of situated practice, Mary Juzwik (Chapter 4) and Julie Hengst (Chapter 5) examine how participation in narrative tellings shapes the ongoing development of persons, their social identities, and their social relations. Juzwik analyzes recontextualization and entextualization in a narrative spell (a chain of linked narratives) in a seventh-grade English classroom, probing in particular constructions of moral stance in relation to English literature and ethnicity. Examining conversational narratives


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in clinical and everyday interactions of adults with aphasia and their routine communication partners, Hengst analyzes embodied tellings of narratives, particularly the alignment of multiple semiotics in specific narrative performances and reformulations. Rick Iedema (Chapter 6) takes up resemiotization in a wider circumference as he examines the trajectory of a national policy reform (open disclosure of adverse medical events) in Australia, noting how new technologies have altered the pace of, and patterns of participation in, policymaking and analyzing the way these processes sought to weave together commitments among stakeholder groups as discursively tentative representational modalities shifted towards highly authoritative modalities of meaning making. Barry Saferstein and Srikant Sarangi (Chapter 7) and Jeffrey Grabill and Stuart Blythe (Chapter 8) explore the ways relative newcomers encounter and grapple with scientific discourses in two quite different cases. Saferstein and Sarangi consider how interactionally mediated multimodal representations contribute to understandings of genetics; they analyze the multimodal affordances of genetics displays in a public educational exhibit and video recordings of high school students using computer simulations and heuristic games in a biology classroom. Grabill and Blythe trace semiotic remediation as an urban community group works to do citizen science – assembling information and texts from diverse sources and across multiple technical discourses in order to craft rhetorically effective responses to address the environmental and health risks of government plans for dredging a local shipping channel. Paul Prior (Chapter 9) examines new media design production in the work of a university group (professors and graduate students) revising an online art object, focusing on situated semiotic remediations that blend talk, drawing, listing, data entry and programming, and gesturing (over screen and paper). Judith Irvine’s afterword reflects on how the notion of semiotic remediation is situated in conversations about discourse, semiotics, and culture, and she notes several issues for research on semiotic remediation, especially questions of how to bound and motivate studies and how to link local sites to larger and longer-term regimes of value. The varied contexts and frameworks represented in these chapters attest to the interdisciplinary character of this work, but also to the challenges of interdisciplinarity as diverse literatures, rhetorical traditions, objects of inquiry, and sociopolitical projects are brought together. This volume begins to suggest how researchers in different disciplines can examine semiotic remediation by attending to semiotic artifacts and




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the situated activity in which they are produced, circulated, received, and used.

In many ways, this edited collection complements and extends the lines of work we have cited (quite thinly, we fear) throughout this introduction. Taking up a broad range of theories, highlighting inscriptional practices as well as multimodal texts, attending to gestures as well as computer technologies, and investigating diverse settings, this volume proposes a view of semiotic remediation that we believe can make important contributions to increasingly rich and deep lines of scholarship. One of the key extensions is the attention given here to the situated production of semiotic artifacts, to analyzing, for example, writing-as-activity rather than only as object-in-the-environment. Another is the principled extension of dialogics into the full range of semiotics, which should, for example, shift the basic question for gesture studies from how gestures mimic linguistic systems to how they function dialogically, just as it should shift attention in semiotics from the formal properties of different semiotics to the blending of semiotics-in-action. Going forward from this volume, we believe that the conversations among the different lines of theory and research represented here need to intensify to produce collective engagement with a broad semiotic theory that examines remediation as discourse practice. For example, further work within this framework might rearticulate questions of how brain and body, environment and action, are linked; of how activity flows chronotopically across particular sociocultural sites; of how a re is realized and with what consequence. Because theories are conditioned by and adapted to the examples they have been developed around, we hope that the theoretical concepts and tools that will be called out and honed by this new set of problems – these new foci of attention – will be richer for having to address such semiotic and social heterogeneity. The fully embodied, mindful character of human practice is only beginning to become visible; consistent focused inquiry on practice in this sense will continue to push the evolution and refinement of theoretical and methodological toolkits. The promise of such approaches is a growing understanding of sociocultural practices that is finer-grained, better articulated to histories, and better aligned to the complex, contradictory character of human worlds. We believe such knowledge can help illuminate and address the steep challenges we face as a species.


Conclusion



1. Work that introduces or exemplifies methods for close analyses of talk, text, media, and gesture includes: Bazerman and Prior (2004), Bazerman and Russell (2003), Chaiklin and Lave (1993), Drew and Heritage (1992), Duranti and Goodwin (1992), Elkins (1999), Heath and Luff (2000), Kendon (1990), Kita (2003), McNeill (2000), Ochs and Capps (2001), Silverstein and Urban (1996), Tannen (1989), van Leeuwen and Jewitt (2001), Wertsch (1991, 1998). Recently, several volumes (for example, Baldry and Thibault, 2006; Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001; Norris, 2004; Scollon and Scollon, 2003, 2004) have begun the work of integrating the pieces to fill out the puzzle of multimodal methodology.


Note


The ‘Poetry Slam,’ Mathemagicians, and Middle School Math: Tracing Trajectories of Actors and Artifacts Kevin Roozen Auburn University

Looking ahead to his student-teaching assignment, a key step toward becoming a secondary mathematics teacher after completing his undergraduate degree in math education, Brian Skaj1 stated that he hoped to develop his students’ mathematical abilities by posing problems that involve making general leaps and making good mathematical thoughts rather than [telling students to] do one through forty in the book. I really want kids to test things mathematically, because that will develop their math fluency. That’s really where you learn mathematics, when you have to try to use math in an eloquent way. That’s what math is about. Brian’s efforts as a student teacher, then, would be not be geared toward training his students in rote memorization and application of mathematical formulas and principles. Instead, he wanted to encourage his students toward ‘making general leaps and making good mathematical thoughts’ that would lead to a deep and sustained engagement with mathematical practice. Four months later, as Brian did his student teaching in a middle school geometry classroom, he drew from a wealth of literate resources at his disposal to develop his students’ ‘fluency’ and ‘eloquence’ with mathematics. Helping him toward this goal were two key ‘tools,’ as Brian would repeatedly refer to them as we talked about his teaching. The first, used to heighten the class’s curiosity about pi, involved Brian quickly reciting and then writing on the chalkboard its value to about a dozen digits beyond the decimal. Responding to a student’s query about the value of pi, for example, Brian would respond,


2

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‘How big is pi? It’s three point one four one five nine two six five three five eight nine seven nine and so on.’ The second consisted of a journaling prompt inviting students to create superheroes possessing different types of mathematical powers. The prompt begins, ‘Come up with a superhero or super villain whose trademark is related to math or geometry. Give a few of his/her superpowers and some of his/her most hated enemies.’ These discoursal ‘tools’ bear traces of their use across a number of activities. Most readily, perhaps, they index Brian’s efforts as a mathematics teacher working to pique his students’ interest in the study of geometry, an ability he had honed not only through the abundance of education courses he had taken but also through his training and experience as a volunteer math teacher. Of course, they also index Brian’s encounters with mathematical practice throughout his long history as a mathematics student, a trajectory of participation stretching back to his earliest encounters with mathematical discourse in school. And yet, less obviously, these tools are also furrowed with the uses they have seen in a number of other literate activities,2 uses seemingly far removed from Brian’s participation as a mathematics student and teacher. Brian’s recitation of pi to a dozen or more digits, for example, is borrowed from his extensive engagement with a sketch comedy skit he created and performed as a member of a comedy group. The mathematical superheroes journaling prompt, on the other hand, is repurposed from Brian’s efforts to create a system of magic for a fantasy role-playing game, as well as a series of characters based on that system, that he and some friends had been developing and playing for a number of years. This chapter draws from a longitudinal ethnographic study of a range of Brian’s literate engagements that collected a wide variety of texts, supplemented by observation as well as open-ended and text-based interviews, over a two-year period, and that also reached back to a number of Brian’s earlier literate engagements before the study began. In partially tracing the lengthy trajectories these tools have traced across multiple literate activities,3 this chapter ultimately argues for increased attention to the sociohistoric and semiotic histories of actors and artifacts across domains.


Kevin Roozen 25

Situating literate artifacts Gesturing toward decades of writing research that had situated literate activity tightly within a particular discourse community or activity system, and thus had carved the literate landscape into a series of discrete,



autonomous territories, Russell (1997) identified the lack of knowledge regarding the circulation of literate tools among multiple domains as ‘a central problem in writing research’ (p. 504). In order that writing studies might bridge this gap, Russell called for research that addressed, empirically, theoretically, and methodologically, ‘how doing school, doing work, and doing the other (political, familial, recreational, etc.) things our lives are made of come together through the mediation of writing’ as well as ‘the ways people change as writers . . . as they move within and among various social practices’ (p. 504). Russell (1999) reiterated his call in a later publication, pointing yet again to the need for inquiry into the relationship between the literate practices and processes that circulate among school and ‘business, industry, government, media, advocacy groups, and so on in which professionals work, as well as the families, neighborhoods, and ethnic communities out of which students come’ (p. 89). Over the past decade, responses that address Russell’s (1997, 1999) calls have tended to locate literate practices and processes within extensive networks connecting school with work. In calling for further inquiry into the circulation of literate tools and practices, Smart (2000) suggested a series of longitudinal qualitative studies focusing on: university students moving from an introductory composition course into the realm of discipline-specific writing; students moving from undergraduate studies into graduate work in a discipline; students moving into the workplace, either temporarily as interns in a co-op program or permanently as employees; members of a business organization moving from one division or department to another; people changing careers; and individuals returning to university after a number of years in the workplace. (p. 247) In line with Smart’s suggestion, a number of studies have focused attention on the linkages between disciplinary and professional practice. Freedman and Adam (2000) outline the radical disconnects between writing for advanced undergraduate courses and matched workplace settings, arguing that literate artifacts situate writers in particular cultural, social, and institutional contexts to the extent that undergraduates and employees write in and for entirely different worlds. Ketter and Hunter (2003) explore the resonances and dissonances that one undergraduate negotiates between her writing for a women’s history class and for an internship in the college’s public relations office. Russell and Yanez


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(2003) follow the textual pathways that link disciplinary work of a history course into an expansive network that connects classroom and professional genres. More recently, Beaufort’s (2007) remarkable six-year longitudinal study traces one writer’s efforts to negotiate the synergies and conflicts among disciplinary activities of undergraduate courses in history and engineering and then between the tools and practices privileged in the university and those he encounters in his job as an engineer following graduation. Noting the pronounced tendency in writing studies to bound the circulation of disciplinary texts and tools well within official worlds of school and the workplace, a number of scholars began extending those pathways into vernacular literate activities, those self-sponsored, informally learned literate engagements ‘rooted in everyday experiences and serv[ing] everyday purposes’ (Barton and Hamilton, 1998, p. 251) that animate people’s literate lives beyond academic and professional obligations. Prior (1998) and Prior and Shipka (2003) trace the farflung multimodal networks that link personal and domestic activities into the chains of textual production for academic and professional tasks. Medway (2001) examines the ways everyday genres commonly employed in personal journals and daily planners come to inform architecture students’ use of professional sketchbooks. Roozen (2008) explores the ways that one undergraduate drew upon literate practices from extracurricular journalism, poetry, and stand-up comedy in order to accomplish a number of school tasks. These analyses underscore the need for discourse studies to follow even more fully ‘the chains of acts, artifacts, and actors that are woven together and unwoven in polyvalent moments of being’ (Prior and Shipka, 2003, p. 75) – particularly those that link the vernacular with the privileged activities of school and work – and to include the vernacular more prominently in accounts and analyses of academic and professional action. In addition, they suggest the need to follow literate actors and artifacts not just across a broader range of activities and representational media, but diachronically throughout longer spans of time as well.

Chains of repurposing and remediation


Kevin Roozen 27

I situate my thinking about Brian’s various literate engagements in a body of theoretical work that posits persons acting with mediational means as the functional unit of analysis and attends to the continuities of artifacts and actors across domains. Wertsch (1998; Wertsch, del Rio, and Alvarez, 1995) identifies the tendency to be redeployed for a range



of activities, a process he refers to as spin-off, as a key property of the various means that shape human action. His analysis of the production of fiberglass points out that while the material’s high strength to weight ratio made it attractive to the military for building lighter airplanes, its high flexibility eventually made it a prized material for pole-vaulting and fishing poles. According to Wertsch, this spin-off, or repurposing, of cultural tools across contexts is the rule rather than the exception. ‘Most of the cultural tools we employ,’ Wertsch (1998) claims, ‘were not designed for the purposes to which they are being put. . . . In a sense, one could say that we are in a position of always “misusing” poles, words, patterns of speaking and thinking, and so forth in carrying out our actions’ (p. 59). Scollon’s (2001) fine-grained ethnographic study of Brenda, a toddler encountering a number of cultural tools, traces even more extensive trajectories of use and reuse across activities. A crayon employed by Brenda in one instance as a tool for drawing is used again as a tool for learning color, again as an object to be named, and yet again as an object to be handed to another as a form of social interaction. A pot and spoon that Brenda encounters as tools for eating a meal are taken up later as instruments for making noise. According to Scollon (2001), these repurposings are not discrete, isolated uses; rather, they serve as links in an ontogenetic chain across activities as cultural tools are appropriated, with each repurposing informed by those that have come before and paving the way for those that follow. For the individual, the ability to act with a particular cultural tool is the aggregation of a history of concrete, specific uses and reuses of that tool for a wide range of functions across a wide range of activities. Brenda’s ability to act with the crayon for drawing, for example, is informed by and reflective of all of her engagements with the crayon, not just for drawing but also for naming, learning colors, handing, and perhaps other ‘misuses’ as well. The production and appropriation of cultural tools, then, occur not solely within any single community of practice, but rather across an ontogenetic chain that runs through multiple nexus of practice. Scollon defines a nexus of practice as a ‘network or matrix of intersecting practices which, although they are never perfectly or inevitably linked into any finalized or finalizable latticework of regular patterns, nevertheless form a network or nexus’ (p. 16). Scollon (2001) locates the source of such repurposing in the multifunctionality that arises from a tool being exploited in one instance based on its more normative semiotic characteristics and then again based on its more peripheral or incidental ones. In the case of Brenda’s


28


crayon, it is its ability to make marks on paper that is exploited for drawing, and yet other semiotic features suitably position it to be turned to other uses: its particular shade as a way to learn color; what it is called as an object to be named; its size, shape, and weight as a suitable object for handing to another. ‘Each use,’ Scollon (2001) argues, ‘elaborates and complicates the structure of the mediational means and the habitus’ and thus ‘opens up the potential for more complex uses’ (p. 135). In this sense, the ontogenetic chain that links a broad array of activities also links an extensive trajectory of re-representations as well. Scollon (2005) describes an even more detailed and extensive history of resemiotization in his experience installing hardwood flooring. In particular, he traces the trajectory of a flooring specialist’s knowledge and experience re-represented in a book about laying hardwood floors – first as the book’s text and images are read and discussed by Scollon and his wife while they plan and prepare to install new flooring in their home; then as materials for the project are ordered and delivered; then as Scollon and a relative install the flooring, action which evokes multiple resemiotizations of the book’s texts and images as well as multiple instances of resemiotizing earlier talk and action; and finally as Scollon incorporates that experience into a chapter in an academic publication. What becomes readily apparent in following such trajectories and attending to the resemiotization of mediational means as they are repeatedly reused across activities, states Scollon (2008), is that Much of the discourse which is of relevance to a moment of action is, in fact, displaced from that action, often at quite a distance and across a wide variety of times, places, people, media, and objects. As we have expanded the circumference (Burke 1969 [1945]) of our view of the moment of action we have come to consider these complex displacements to work across multiple moments in which the discourse is transformed semiotically. (pp. 233–4) Scollon (2008) refers to these trajectories of reuse and re-representation as discourse itineraries, ‘the historical path of these resemiotized displacements’ (p. 234) as they are reworked across activities. Discourse itineraries form the entire assemblage of repurposings and remediations that make themselves felt in action here and now. Such lengthy chains of re-representation have also been analyzed by a number of other theorists. Latour (1999) and Hutchins (1995) follow cascades of scientific and mathematical inscriptions as they are re-represented across the diverse


Kevin Roozen 29



activities involved in doing science and docking ships. Prior, Hengst, Roozen, and Shipka (2006) offer analyses of a pretend family game, an undergraduate writing task, and the creation and performance of a comedy skit that chart extended transformations of artifacts across a wide range of representational media. In thinking about literate action, these theoretical frameworks focus attention on the extended sociohistoric and semiotic histories of the cultural tools mediating literate activity. Rather than anchoring actors and artifacts within any single site of engagement or domain, these frameworks invite consideration of the full range of reuses and re-representations that actors and artifacts have seen across multiple domains, the full expanse of the discourse itinerary (Scollon, 2008) that persons, tools, and practices have been worked through. In drawing attention to the profoundly heterogeneous nature of literate activity, these frameworks also direct attention to the lengthy chains of repurposing and remediation that carry traces of various literate thens and theres into literate activity here and now. I present here two documented narratives (Prior, 1998; Becker, 2000) that partially trace the sociohistoric and semiotic trajectories of mathematical tools as they are repurposed and remediated across diverse multiple activities and representational media over a span of multiple years. In assembling and presenting my analyses in this narrative form, my goal is to offer a coherent account of the historical pathways of Brian repurposing these cultural tools without flattening out the richness, complexity, and dynamics of how literate actors and artifacts are continually taken up, transformed, recombined, and recoordinated across space, time, and media.

Repurposing tools via the Poetry Slam This first narrative partially traces the ontogenetic pathway of key mathematical tools (but especially focusing on the mathematical symbol for pi) as they come to be shaped over a three-year period through their use in an upper-division mathematics course and then later as Brian first reconfigures them for use in a sketch comedy routine, then again to engage middle schoolers in a geometry lesson, and finally as Brian’s students redeploy them to cheer on a favorite teacher during a faculty dodgeball game. In addition to tracing a lengthy sequence of repurposing and remediation across official and unofficial domains, this narrative also highlights the ways multiple representations are deployed simultaneously (as Prior argues in this volume) and are repeatedly brought into coordination with one another across diverse activities.


30


As a sophomore math education major enrolled in a number of upper-division mathematics courses, including Topics in Geometry, Math Logic, and Elementary Real Analysis, Brian operated on a literate landscape densely textured with the specialized discourse of advanced mathematics: an array of terms, theorems, concepts, symbols, formulas, proofs, figures, shapes, and explanations that filled his notebooks and animated the texts and talk of his classes. Although many of these ‘tools,’ as Brian referred to them as we browsed pages of his math notebooks and talked about his mathematics coursework during two years of interviews, were fairly common and familiar – formulas for calculating area, circumference, and volume; the Pythagorean theorem; and common symbols indicating addition, multiplication, pi (see Figure 2.1, at left), functions; and so on – others seemed utterly foreign to me and required a great deal of explanation. Brian’s notebook for Math 302: Non-Euclidean Geometry, a theoretical course that focused on the geometry of three-dimensional objects, for example, was to me an impenetrable array of unfamiliar terms, formulas, and calculations. Brian, however, felt quite at home with this discourse, and his familiarity was readily apparent as he responded to my frequent questions. When I asked for an explanation of the term ‘unit circle’ that appeared on a number of pages in his notebook (see Figure 2.1, at right), for example, Brian quickly responded, [t]he unit circle is a tool to help understand the behavior of trig functions, like sine, cosine, tangent, and so on. It’s a different version of another tool for this purpose as well: graphing the functions themselves and memorizing their shapes and the x, y-intercepts. We basically always had a choice of which tool to use. I always preferred the unit circle because I found it more elegant. When trig functions came up and I needed a quick reference, I was like ‘Hey, what’s the value of tan(x) when x = pi?’ In addition to identifying the unit circle as his preferred ‘tool’ for ‘understanding the behavior of trig functions,’ Brian’s explanation also highlights his adeptness at acting with a wide variety of other tools in his discoursal repertoire, including the sine, cosine, and tangent functions and a common method of charting their shapes along x and y axes. This array of tools, which figured so prominently in the literate activity of Brian’s mathematics classes, was well-suited to solving equations, calculating angles, and analyzing functions. And yet, Brian would retool them for use in a variety of other activities as well.


Kevin Roozen 31



Figure 2.1 Images of Brian’s Math 302 notebook showing his use of pi (at left) and the unit circle (at right)

During the summer following Brian’s junior year at the university, he and some friends formed a sketch comedy group they named Big Dog Eat Child (BDEC). Geared toward a college-aged audience, the group’s sketches explored a variety of topics and genres, including political satire, cultural critique, and some improvisational comedy. While the cast members’ formal attire, dark pants, pressed white shirts, and black ties suggested a stately, orderly performance, BDEC’s shows tended toward a chaotic assemblage of action, often with two or three sketches going on simultaneously. One of the first sketches the group created was the Poetry Slam, a skit based on a contest in which a number of the group members would solicit topics from the audience, improvise and deliver humorous poems based on those topics, and then have those poems scored by judges selected from those attending the performance. As they developed the sketch, the members of BDEC decided they wanted to use a scoring system that contributed to the overall humor of the sketch, that essentially would be as humorous as the poems the cast members would create. During a brainstorming session in which group members explored a number of alternatives to a common ‘one through ten’ ranking method, Brian and another member of the group proposed a system based on a series of mathematical concepts: negative infinity, zero, and pi. Reflecting on the genesis of this system during the session, Brian stated,


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I was at the center of it, spouting math lingo and generating most of the jokes that convinced us it would be a funny idea. I mean, I’m gonna crack math jokes if we’re just hanging around. Me and [other member’s name] came up with it, and I was like, ‘Hey, this is how we


Kevin Roozen 33

According to Brian, the humor of the scoring system lies in its unnecessary complexity. As a means of scoring poems, negative infinity, zero, and pi function as a kind of Rube Goldberg machine, accomplishing a fairly simple task in an unnecessarily complicated manner, but not so complicated as to be unfamiliar to a college-aged audience or unusable to score the poems. Later, he drafted, revised, reworked, and polished his explanation of this system into an opening monologue for his character in the sketch, the ‘rambling announcer’ who opened the Poetry Slam by selecting the judges, introducing each of these symbols, and outlining how the scoring system worked. Accompanied by another member of the group, whose job it was to hold up a series of cards depicting various representations of negative infinity, zero, and pi at appropriate times throughout the monologue, Brian as the ‘rambling announcer’ would take the stage and introduce the sketch by exclaiming something like the following, which was recorded during one of the group’s earliest performances: And now, the Poetry Slam. [cheering from audience] That’s right folks, welcome to the Big Dog Eat Child Poetry Slam, where we’ll be hitting you with chairs and then our poetry and stuff. So, we need from the audience three judges. You sir in the back there. Uh, ma’am up front, sure, and the gentleman in the aisle. Okay, come on up to the front if you’re going to be a judge. We’ve got some cards for you. How the cards work. We don’t have your typical rating system, one through ten, bullshit, we’ve got a very simple system. Having selected the judges and provided them with a stack of scorecards, Brian would then launch into his explanation of the ‘very simple’ system for rating the poems, which would draw repeated bouts of laughter from the audience. Deploying his familiarity with the discourse of specialized mathematics, Brian would provide an explanation for the three mathematical concepts at the heart of the unnecessarily complicated system, along with a number of humorous asides. As he delivered his monologue, his stage partner would display to the audience the appropriate symbols drawn on the cards. Introducing the first symbol, negative infinity, as ‘the smallest number there is,’ for example, Brian would instruct the judges, ‘If you thought the poem was the worst thing you’ve ever heard in your life, [laughter from audience] that the


ought to do it. There’s three symbols, negative infinity, zero, and pi. Negative infinity is the worst rating, zero is the absence of value, and pi is something good.’



poet should never have spoken at all, that humanity is the worse for it, give it a negative infinity.’ Explaining the value of zero, the second symbol representing ‘the absence of value, it’s neither up nor down, bad nor good, left nor right, it’s just plain nothing at all,’ Brian would tell the judges that ‘If the poet might as well have just not opened his mouth, give him a zero.’ Introducing pi, the third symbol, Brian voiced the following lines as his partner held up cards displaying three different visual representations of pi (see transcript at left and images at right in Figure 2.2). In this repurposing, multiple representations of pi are jointly codeployed in order to explain the third symbol employed to rate poems. While Brian vocally delivers the value of pi to 22 digits beyond the decimal point, his stage partner displays three different visual representations in turn – pi as the mathematical symbol, as the numeric value consisting of 100 digits, and as the homonym ‘pie’ – a move that elicits a good deal of laughter from the audience. In addition to multiplying the meaning of the verbal representation, displaying the cards demonstrates to the judges the procedure they are to follow for scoring each poem throughout the sketch. Hutchins (1995), analyzing the extensive heterogeneous and heterochronic array of representations involved in fixing the positions of a ship, stated that ‘the functional system that performs the task is a constellation of structured representational media that are brought into coordination with one another’ (p. 170). In the same manner, Brian’s use of pi to score poems involves assembling and coordinating a far-flung network of representations. As the sketch progressed, this hybrid assemblage of multiple representations of pi would be deployed repeatedly by Brian and the judges. After BDEC members elicited topics from the audience and then improvised poems based on those topics, their poems would be scored by the three judges holding up the appropriate scorecard. Reading the symbols off of the cards, Brian would announce the scores to the audience and calculate the total. Figuring the total for one of the poems during one of the group’s early performances, for example, Brian announced,


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Okay, let’s see what [member’s name] gets. We’ve got a pi. [Cheers from audience] And a zero. [Commotion from audience] And another pi. [Cheers from audience] Oh, be fair. The Croatian judge is always the hardest. So, in second place, [member’s name], with a measly full rotation of the unit circle. So sorry, you have two pi.


Brian’s monologue: ‘So, uh, our third symbol used to rate poems is pi. [Partner holds up a card displaying the symbol for pi. See Image 1, at right] Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, approximately three point one four one five nine two six five three five eight nine seven nine three two three eight four six two [laughter from audience] six units of poetry. [Partner holds up a card displaying the value of pi to 100 digits. See Image 2, at right] So, if you thought the poem was slightly bigger than zero, say about three or four, then give it a pi. [Partner holds up a card displaying a hand-drawn image of a pie. See Image 3, at right] We don’t have any symbols higher than pi because frankly we don’t expect our poems to be that good.’

Image 1. Card displaying symbol for pi.

Image 2. Card displaying numerical value of pi.∗

Image 3. Card displaying image of a pie. ∗

The original card had 100 numbers handwritten in magic marker after the decimal point. These numbers were not readable on the video still image. For readability, the first 39 of those numbers have been added digitally, as print numbers, to Image 2.


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Figure 2.2 Transcript (at left) and cards (at right) employed to explain pi as a means of scoring poems performed during the Poetry Slam sketch



Beyond merely calculating the scores of the poems, Brian also coordinated multiple representations to generate humorous quips about those scores. In the quotation above, for example, Brian pokes fun at the low score this member’s poem received by announcing that a score of two pi would produce only ‘a measly full rotation of the unit circle.’ Discussing the mathematical nature of what he referred to as the ‘nerdy math jokes’ he came up with to comment on the poems, Brian stated in an interview, Like when someone scores a two pi, like in trigonometry, in the unit circle where 180 degrees is pi, 360 is two pi, and so on. So when someone scores a two pi in the Poetry Slam, as the announcer I’m like, ‘Hey, a full rotation of the unit circle, two pi by Jim.’ I crack those kind of jokes. I improvise those comments. I always make some sort of joke about the math that people are rating things with, because it just comes naturally to me. According to Brian, the Poetry Slam quickly became BDEC’s signature sketch, and he attributed its success and popularity to the humorous scoring system as well as the strange topics suggested by the audience and the cast members’ ability to generate and perform humorous poems based on those suggestions. In creating and performing the scoring system, then, Brian tied the discourse of advanced mathematics into the chain of textual invention and production of a comedy sketch, retooling and re-representing pi, a critical tool previously used to understand the relationship of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, to serve as part of a system for ranking and scoring poems. Likewise, he refashioned the unit circle, a ‘tool used to help understand the behavior of trig functions’ and for determining ‘the value of tan(x) when x = pi,’ to function as a humorous quip about performers’ scores. Notice, though, that despite being repurposed for use in the Poetry Slam, traces of the use these mathematical tools saw in Brian’s math classes are still quite visible in his opening monologue, his scoring of the poems, and his humorous asides. Negative infinity, zero, pi, and the unit circle are still being employed to solve math problems, just ones not nearly as complex as those for Brian’s upper-division courses. Throughout this delicate work of heterogeneous engineering (Bazerman, 1999; Law, 1989; Shipka, this volume), traces of these tools’ earlier representational states remain visible, even though these tools have


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been remediated across the talk and texts of Brian’s math classes; voiced during BDEC’s brainstorming session; and later entextualized, revised, rehearsed, memorized, and delivered both orally and visually in the group’s practices and performances. Collectively, these traces index the multiple ways that Brian’s previous uses of mathematical tools in his math classes function as shadow conversations (Irvine, 1996) that texture the tools’ use in the Poetry Slam as well as their uptake by the audience. As Brian began his student teaching during the spring of his senior year, he extended this trajectory of remediation into the geometry unit he was asked to teach at a local middle school. The histories of use and reuse these tools had seen and carried with them provided ‘a wide range of choices available to [him], including choices that are far from traditional in appearance, but which nonetheless speak to the circumstances’ (Bazerman, 1997, p. 23) as he worked to engage his middle school students in the mathematical study of shapes. Commenting on his frequent tendency to draw from his experience with sketch comedy in his student teaching, Brian stated, I just picked up little stuff [from comedy sketches] and used it. It gets their [the students’] attention. Anything to get them to ask me a question, because when they ask me a question, then I’ve got them. I mean it’s not like working an audience, but like there is a time when I know I’ve got an audience interacting with me, and I can just take off from there. It’s like once they [the students] ask me a question or if I just do something that confuses the hell out of them, then I have them. One such strategy that Brian mentioned worked particularly well involved repurposing the pi bit from his monologue as the announcer in the Poetry Slam sketch. Describing an interaction with some of his students that occurred as he was teaching a unit about circles just a few days before one of our interviews, Brian stated, I recited pi, you know the twenty digits that I do in the show . . . . We were talking about circles, and some kid goes ‘Pi is three point one four, right?’ and I go ‘Actually it’s three point one four one five nine two six five,’ and so on, you know like I do in the show. And then I wrote it out on the board, and they were all like [makes


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a face showing a mixture of surprise and amazement]. And then that got them asking questions like ‘Well when does pi end?’ and [I was like] ‘it doesn’t, thanks for asking.’ I do stuff like that all the time, like, the rambling announcer from the Poetry Slam is sort of a character of mine, but I mean it’s me, it’s not really a character, but I get in that mode and I can just sort of expound on things and get information across pretty quick and get people wanting to interact with me. Rather than introducing students to pi simply as a short numerical value to be memorized and applied, Brian seizes a student’s question about how many digits pi possesses as an opportunity to productively redeploy the pi bit from the Poetry Slam. In doing so, he extends the lengthy trajectory of repurposings from learning math and doing sketch comedy into the literate activity of teaching a geometry lesson, this time delivering the pi bit to an audience of middle schoolers and entextualizing one of the visual representations on a chalkboard rather than having it displayed on a card. In redeploying the pi bit in his geometry lesson, Brian is acting with not just representations of pi from his math notebook and the other texts and talk of his mathematics and math education courses, but those representations as they have been retooled for use in the Poetry Slam sketch as well. Brian’s previous use of pi as a way to understand the relationship of a circle’s circumference to its diameter and his repurposing of it as a humorous means of scoring and commenting on poems combine to position it as a means of piquing his middle schoolers’ curiosity and, hopefully, heightening their engagement with the geometry lesson. In voicing the pi bit and writing this extended series of digits on the chalkboard, Brian also extends the lengthy chain of simultaneous re-representation (the representations of pi in the texts and talk of Brian’s undergraduate math class, in the talk and cards of the ‘Poetry Slam,’ and in the talk and texts of Brian’s middle school classroom). Viewed from the dominant perspective of what Prior (1998) refers to as ‘the chronotope of the classroom’ (p. 249), such instances of Brian’s creative repurposing and remediation of tools from the Poetry Slam skit might seem like little more than brief sidebars, or perhaps even intrusions, to the more formal instruction being delivered, and yet Brian felt they often made quite an impression on his students. For example, traces of Brian’s reuse of the pi bit from the sketch, for example, were still very much part of the classroom some five weeks later when


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Figure 2.3 Signs created by Brian’s middle school students and displayed in his classroom

I observed his teaching. Prominently displayed on the classroom’s front wall were two large posters designed by the students, both of which, according to Brian, indexed the bit from the Poetry Slam that he had used while teaching the unit on circles. The first exclaimed, ‘Go Go Mr. Skaj 3.14519! Math Rules’ and the second colorfully proclaimed, ‘I Luv Mr. Skaj π3. 14 × D = C’ (see Figure 2.3). In response to my query about the signs and the inscriptions they bore, Brian stated that they developed out of a chant the students had created based on the pi bit to cheer him on during the school’s annual faculty–student dodgeball game: They [the students] suggested a chant, so they suggested ‘We love mister Skaj, three one four one five nine.’4 The boys were like ‘we can’t say “we love”, how about “go go”?’ and I was like ‘okay, fine.’ And for the kids that didn’t want to be loud and scream their heads off I just said ‘Well, you can make a sign for me,’ and a couple of them did. [After the game] I didn’t want to just have it there [in the gym], I wanted to have it shown all the time so I put it up in the classroom.


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Of all the material at their disposal from which to fashion a cheer, Brian’s students selected the pi bit from the Poetry Slam that he had used a few weeks earlier during their lesson on circles. The students repurposed and remediated the representations of pi they had encountered in the context of a geometry lesson into a chant to cheer on a favorite teacher. For the students, it must have seemed a fitting way to encourage their



math teacher-turned-dodgeball participant, and it certainly helped that the partial rhyme between ‘Skaj’ and ‘nine’ met the requirements for an effective chant. Not wanting to scream, but still wanting to show their support for Brian, the less vocal students entextualized versions of the chant on a series of posters to be hung in the gymnasium during the dodgeball match. Taking up Latour’s (1987) suggestion that any study of inscriptional practice should ‘look at how the observers move in space and time, how the mobility, stability and combinability of inscriptions are enhanced, how the networks are extended, how all of the informations are tied together in a cascade of re-representation’ (pp. 246–7), this narrative traces the historical trajectory of mathematical tools through a number of official and unofficial literate activities. With each reuse, traces of previous deployments make their presence felt. It is important to note the way multiple simultaneous remediations (not single representations in one mode) are being woven, unwoven, and rewoven together. The representations animating the talk of Brian’s undergraduate math class and entextualized in Brian’s math notebook (as well as other texts that are in play) are later reinscribed and revoiced, as well as memorized and performed, during the Poetry Slam, then revoiced and reinscribed again as Brian teaches the lesson on circles, and then revoiced and reinscribed yet again as Brian’s students create chants and posters.

Remaking math via mathemagicians This second narrative partially follows the pathway charted by mathematical discourse from the university’s math department website as it is repurposed first to develop a system of magic and new characters for a fantasy role-playing game and then further as a journaling prompt for Brian’s middle school geometry students. In addition to tracing the cascade of repurposing and remediation over multiple years and across official and unofficial literate activities, this narrative illuminates the trajectory through representations meant to mediate activity (what Swales, 1996, refers to as occluded genres) and those created for more public display and consumption. It also foregrounds how traces of a tool’s previous use can shape literate action in unintended ways. In addition to a passion for creating and performing sketch comedy, many of the members of BDEC were avid fans of fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons and thus shared a long history of getting together for marathon gaming sessions. Besides a range of commercially available games, the group also enjoyed playing a game


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dreamt up by one of the group’s older members. The game, which the group named Jumpers, is based on the premise that on October 29, 2001 some unknown phenomenon caused one-third of Earth’s population to be transported through space and time. Those individuals are constantly ‘jumping,’ or being transported to different times and locations, where they encounter situations which they must resolve before relocating to yet another time and place. The same desire to create and collaborate that led this group of friends to create BDEC also prompted them in the spring of 2003, the end of Brian’s junior year at the university, to begin more fully developing the game with an eye toward making it available to the public. One of the many tasks facing the group in creating content for the game was developing a system of magic that players could use during game play, a common feature of the fantasy role-playing genre. According to Brian, ‘some of the other systems [of magic] that other people proposed were really just stuff they had taken from other games, like stuff that people knew from playing Dungeons and Dragons. I wanted to do something else.’ Brian began experimenting with various topics upon which to build a system of magic, including various cultural groups (for example, Aztec, Australian aboriginal, Inuit) and physical activities (such as yoga and karate). Dissatisfied with the versions of magic he was able generate from those topics, Brian continued to look for other suitable foundations for a system of magic. Eventually, he hit upon the idea of creating one based on mathematics, stating, ‘typical magic in your D and D [Dungeons and Dragons] and other conventional role playing games is [divided into] evocation; summoning; invocation, which is like chanting, spells, rituals; enchantment; illusion; and that kind of thing. I wanted to divide math up into sections like that.’ By this point of his journey as a math education major, Brian had taken a great many advanced mathematics courses, but he still felt that he lacked the detailed knowledge of the discipline’s various subgroups needed to develop an effective and engaging system of magic for use in the game. Discussing how he obtained the knowledge he needed, Brian stated,


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I just went to [the university’s] math department web site and just looked at the different departments and saw which ones seemed more applied and which ones seemed more abstract. They had, like the number theory department, the algebra department, the analysis


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Using details about the various subfields of mathematics described on the website – actuarial science, algebra, analysis, combinatorics and optimization, differential equations and applied mathematics, geometry and topology, logic, number theory, and probability theory – Brian made notes describing the various kinds of magical abilities that each group would foster: ‘So, [pointing to the notes he’d jotted while browsing the math department’s website – see Figure 2.4] like here’s algebra . . . . And here’s a description of a school [of magic], here’s some spells that might be common in the school, here’s the general style of the magic, like dimension manipulation.’ Working from these and other notes, Brian drafted several different versions of what he called mathemagic, eventually producing an elaborate and complicated system based on algebra, analysis, and some of the other less familiar areas of mathematics, including combinatorics and optimization and differential equations. Upon being implemented into a series of gaming sessions over the following year, mathemagic met with mixed reviews from the rest of the group. According to Brian, two members of the group, one majoring in math and computer science and the other with a strong background in physics, reported that they understood the system quite well and had little trouble employing it during game play. The other players, however, encountered no small amount of difficulty understanding and


department, the geometry department and I just started picking ones to make different schools of magic out of.

Figure 2.4 Excerpts of Brian’s notes regarding magical abilities based on two categories of mathematics: algebra (above) and analysis (below)


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[he] said that I need to find a way to do the system where it’s more like calculus, like the lower levels [of math]. Like where I had described a low level mathemagician being able to perceive and calculate all of the physics of a baseball game just by watching it, that sort of thing, he said that that should be [a mathemagician] who is mid- to high-level.

Unlike the repurposing of mathematical discourse for the Poetry Slam, which seems to have worked well right from the start, the reuse for the Jumpers game did not initially result in an effective system of magic that could be employed by a broad usership, and Brian had to retool it considerably before generating a system that fit their purposes. This is a result of what Scollon (2001) refers to as the ‘partial’ nature of mediational means. In being repurposed across activities, tools fit action only partially rather than exactly, and thus they tend to do more or less than actors intend. The organizational scheme Brian drew upon to construct his initial system had previously been created to differentiate among highly specialized subfields in the discipline of mathematics and to organize, more specifically, the university’s mathematics department. As he repurposed this specialized discourse for the construction of a system of magic and the creation of characters for Jumpers, Brian found this organizational system did much more than he intended. Some players found themselves, as Wertsch (1998) noted in another context, ‘trying to speak, think, and otherwise act by employing a tool . . . that actually impede[d] [their] performance’ (p. 59), thus prompting Brian to base the system on much more familiar subfields of mathematics. After several attempts to simplify the system, Brian eventually settled on a more straightforward version divided into four main disciplines: number theory, algebra, analysis, and geometry. Below, I include an excerpt from the ten-page document Brian created to describe this more streamlined system to the other developers. This excerpt is drawn from the section in which Brian describes the group of mathemagicians he calls ‘algebraics’:


using the system, and requested that the system be modified with an eye toward making the language and concepts more accessible for players without an extensive knowledge of higher-level mathematics and its applications. Recalling how one member had summed up this group’s suggested revisions, Brian stated,



Algebraics are mathemagicians that take algebra as their main focus. Their magics typically deal with dimensional exploitation and manipulation. They are usually not unpleasant to look at, although of course they look pretty nerdy, but there is a well-kept sense of selfpossession about them. They are very deliberate and exact in their endeavors and typically keep a cool head in tense situations. Some choose to use technology to augment their capabilities whether it is through refining their perceptions or enhancing their movements, or simply efficiently collecting data. Age-wise they are typically a bit older, although younger algebraics are not unheard of. Algebraics can be found traveling at will through time and at ease through space in fractions of seconds. In the description above, Brian employs algebraic discourse to describe the magical powers possessed by those known to be algebraics. Characters versed in this strain of mathemagic, for example, could employ their powers of ‘dimensional exploitation and manipulation’ in order to ‘travel at will through time and at ease through space in fractions of seconds.’ In addition to their powers, algebraics’ personalities are also informed by mathematical discourse, although in more subtle ways. Brian’s description above depicts them as being ‘nerdy,’ ‘deliberate and exact,’ and able to ‘keep a cool head.’ As a way to demonstrate to other players how they might work from his basic descriptions to construct mathemagician characters, Brian created a few of his own, including an algebraic named John Russel and an analyst named Bertrand Ford. Figure 2.5 presents a character sheet, a document used by players to create characters and to describe their powers and appearance to other players involved in the game, that Brian filled out for the John Russel character he created. Drawing from his description of algebraics, Brian imbues Russel’s character with a range of powers associated with manipulating dimensions, including the ability to rapidly calculate length and speed, to bend light, and to open doors between dimensions (see Figure 2.5, bottom right). Algebraic discourse also informs other facets of Russel’s character. According to Brian, the titles of Russel’s books and the names of their authors are pieced together from the titles and names he came across while browsing the algebra section of the math department’s website (see Figure 2.5, top right). One might even say that the other objects Russel carries (for example, new algebra proofs, a pad of paper, pencils, and pens) as well as his ‘nerdy’ apparel (glasses, white button-down shirt, books attached to his belt, as seen in Figure 2.5, top and bottom left) are informed by a broader


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Figure 2.5 Copy of the character sheet describing John Russel, one of the mathemagican characters that Brian created for the Jumpers role-playing game

discourses of mathematics in the form of common stereotypes of those with mathematical abilities. In the same way that Brian tied mathematical discourse from his math classes into sketch comedy, here he links the discourse from his classes and the department’s website into the network of textual invention and production of a fantasy role-playing game. What he first encountered as a tool for solving math problems and organizing an academic discipline and a mathematics department now functions as an organizational scheme for an imagined system of magic and as an identity kit for creating characters. This trajectory runs through the talk and text of Brian’s long history of math classes and the department’s website into Brian’s hastily written notes and then into a dense ecology of other texts, including the formal description of the system that Brian emailed to other gamers, John Russel’s character sheet, and later the talk and action during sessions of game play. Consider as well the various representational media through which mathematical discourse has passed


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along this journey: the digital representation on the department’s website was reproduced in Brian’s handwritten notes, then redigitized in the description Brian emailed, then typed into the character sheet, then imaginatively embodied in the figure of the character himself, and then taken up in the text and action of a gaming session. Like the retooling of the pi bit from the Poetry Slam, the remediation of mathematical discourse to create mathemagic characters for the Jumpers game also figured prominently in Brian’s efforts to create opportunities for his middle school students to ‘use math in an eloquent way.’5 Brian’s reuse of aspects of the mathemagician characters he created for the role-playing game is particularly visible, for instance in the following optional journal assignment he created for his geometry students: Come up with a superhero or super villain whose trademark is related to math or geometry. Give a few of his/her superpowers and some of his/her most hated enemies. For example, the Polygon Pirate is a diabolical super villain, bent on stealing the world’s perfect shapes for his own personal collection. He relentlessly seeks to steal the world’s rectangular windows, circular plates, and forms of kites, nothing is safe. But the Congruency Crusader and her trusty sidekick the Maiden of Notation always seem to foil his evil schemes. Echoing his own use of mathematical discourse to create mathemagician characters such as John Russel for Jumpers, this prompt invites his students to turn their developing knowledge of geometry toward creating heroes with geometric powers like the Polygon Pirate, the Congruency Crusader, and the Maiden of Notation. In creating this assignment, then, Brian is repurposing mathematical discourse not just from his math classes and the math department’s website, but that discourse as it has been retooled through its reuse in the Jumpers game. Much as Brian significantly retooled the complicated system of magic he initially developed for Jumpers to make it more usable for a more general audience, he likewise significantly reworks the characters’ powers he offers as an example in the prompt in order to make the assignment more accessible for middle schoolers. Rather than granting the Polygon Pirate the ability to manipulate dimensions of space and time, for example, Brian attributes him with the desire to ‘steal the world’s perfect shapes.’ This narrative analysis partially traces the historical pathway of mathematical discourse through an expansive itinerary (Scollon, 2008) that


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includes the university’s math department website, the Jumpers roleplaying game, and an informal writing prompt in a middle school geometry class. Across this itinerary, it has been variously used to organize an academic discipline and a university department, as the basis for a system of magic and a series of characters that inform game play, and as a way to encourage middle school students to use math in an eloquent fashion. This itinerary has included a number of remediations, with the digital pages on the departmental website reinscribed in Brian’s handwritten notes for a system of magic, then redigitized into a more formal draft, then reinscribed in the character sheet and imaginatively embodied in the characters Brian created, then entextualized in the journaling assignment, and eventually taken up by the students in their journals. Throughout its journey, it has alternated between representations meant more to mediate activity, including Brian’s hastily sketched notes for the system of magic and the character sheet for the John Russel character, and representations meant for more public consumption, including the departmental website and the journaling prompt presented to his students.

Tracing trajectories of actors and artifacts At the close of the spring 2004 semester, Brian completed his student teaching and the rest of his math and education coursework, receiving excellent evaluations and grades for both his knowledge of mathematics and his teaching abilities. Upon graduating at the end of the term, he accepted a position teaching mathematics at a high school in the Chicago area. In the fall of 2008, Brian began serving as the head of the math department at the school’s new campus. He also continued to be an active member of BDEC, which has generated quite a following in the Chicago area and has even performed at the Laugh Factory in California after winning a local sketch comedy competition. The Poetry Slam and its unorthodox scoring system continued as a staple in BDEC’s shows until January of 2008, when the group decided to adopt a new format for its shows. Brian’s involvement with developing the Jumpers game lasted only a year after his graduation from the university, but the system of mathemagic he created had already begun to be written into the documents the group was drafting and assembling as they codified rules and instructions for play. The group continued to test, refine, and polish the game, and by 2008 the two original developers had copyrighted Jumpers as a role-playing game. Although Brian is not currently enrolled as a math student, engaged in the Poetry Slam or working on


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the Jumpers game, the uses and reuses of mathematical discourse for those activities continue to texture Brian’s efforts in the classroom. During our most recent phone conversation, in May of 2008, Brian reported that he continues to employ the pi bit from the Poetry Slam when he introduces his geometry students to the study of circles. ‘It never fails to get their attention,’ he stated, ‘[i]t’s a staple of my teaching.’ Although he has not used the Jumpers-based journaling assignment since his student teaching, Brian stated his long history with gaming is quite visible in his teaching, particularly in an after-school math enrichment class he teaches in which students engage in the popular Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game. Developing the numeracy-related discursive and textual practices necessary to succeed in mathematical and scientific professions is no easy task, and many are not able to complete the difficult journey. One obstacle, according to Lemke (1997), is the often tenuous networks that link school-based instruction in math and science with the work of professional communities. The scant few students who eventually attain membership in mathematical and scientific communities ‘will have traced a path through the network of practices, activities, and CoPs [communities of practice, such as those of school and the profession] that will have passed through all the right places to give them the keys to understand and participate fully’ in the professional world of math and science (Lemke, 1997, p. 45). Brian’s journey into the professional work of mathematics education, which certainly passed through his math and education coursework, his involvement as a volunteer teacher, and his semester of student teaching, did indeed provide him with a number of keys to become a successful mathematics learner and educator. And yet, any analysis of Brian’s pathway toward successfully acting with mathematical discourse as a learner and a teacher, I argue, cannot disregard his sketch comedy and gaming as critical links in the ontogenetic chains of repurposing and remediation along which those abilities developed. If his keys fit the tumblers of learning and teaching math so well, it is because they were partially cut by the remediations they saw in the unofficial worlds of the Poetry Slam and the Jumpers game. Brian’s use of specialized mathematical discourse is not limited to privileged sites of school and work; rather, it circulates through these extensive nexus of practice that connect the literate activity of his school classes, his sketch comedy, his gaming, his teaching, and perhaps others as well. In elaborating the development of the social practice of handing (for example, handing money to a store clerk, a surgical tool to a doctor, a


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crayon to a child), Scollon (2001) notes that the practice ‘is the aggregation, over a considerable period of time, of a history of concrete, specific acts of handing’ even though ‘each of these acts is different from each other; each may be carried out with different participants; each may involve different objects; each has its own constraints on the act of handing; and each act may be different from others in the linkages made with other social and discursive practices’ (p. 73). Brian’s ability to act with mathematical discourse develops in a similar manner, with learning, comedy, gaming, and teaching serving as critical links in its ontogenesis. Of course, Brian’s trajectory is unique, but it speaks to the far-flung networks (Prior and Shipka, 2003) that actors and artifacts trace across multiple domains and representations and throughout the full range of the literate landscapes they inhabit. This trajectory of reappropriation through multiple nexus of practice traces not only the production of Brian’s ability to act with mathematical tools, but also the production of Brian’s identity as math teacher. According to Scollon (2001), in repurposing tools across a range of social practices, persons are producing and reproducing themselves and the social identities associated with those practices. Like cultural tools, then, selves are an aggregation of an array of experiences across multiple and diverse practices. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s (1977) notion of habitus, Scollon (2001) sees this matrix of practices as ‘the basis of the identities we produce and claim through our social actions’ (p. 7). Scollon’s (2001) notions of the production of self across contexts echoes other theoretical work that attends to trajectories of identification and participation across activities (Beach, 2003; Bourdieu, 1977; Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain, 1998; Van Maanen, 1984; Wenger, 1998; Wortham, 2006). According to Holland et al. (1998), these often creatively improvised redeployments of previous experiences from other domains into present situations, a process they refer to as ‘heuristic development’ (p. 40), are a key means by which persons achieve coherence across tasks and author themselves as new kinds of persons. In this sense, the narratives of Brian elaborate not only the ways that complex chains of semiotics arise across domains – school, comedy, gaming, teaching – but also how those chains are implicated in the sociogenetic formation of Brian himself. Brian’s identity as a math student is quite relevant as he participates in the sketch and the creation of the Jumpers game. Likewise, in remediating those tools he had previously reshaped for the sketch and the game, Brian extends his trajectories of identification (Wortham, 2006) as a comedian and a gamer into his engagement


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as a teacher, thus drawing together all of these forms of participation, and perhaps others as well, into one nexus. Tracing these far-flung trajectories does not ask us to merely shift the borders of existing maps of writing, but rather to alter the very principles of our mapmaking. Fundamentally, it demands that researchers’ decisions regarding how inquiry is framed and conducted be informed by notions of time, space, and representational media that are relevant to the literate activity under investigation. Rather than privileging official literate activities associated with school and work and the textual pathways that link them, we might situate those among the fuller range of literate engagements in which persons participate throughout the lifeworld – in broader, more expansive networks of production, distribution, and consumption – even if that directs attention to the array of vernacular literacies typically regarded ‘at best, as cultural alternatives to official literacy; at worst, they are believed to be partial, incomplete forms that are subordinate to the real thing’ (Camitta, 1990, p. 263). In addition to a broader constellation of literate action, such networks call on us to consider a broader range of representational media as well (both in terms of sequences and in terms of simultaneous deployment). Rather than severing sociohistoric histories at the temporal borders of official activities (a class period, a semester, the professional workday or workweek, a professional career) we might adopt the cycles or timescales relevant to other literate action, and then follow as literate actors and artifacts are produced, recruited, repurposed, and re-represented to new ends, and then as multiple pathways come to be linked together, aligned, coordinated, stabilized, or disrupted. Rather than attending solely to who persons are at present, we need to map who they have been in their near and distant pasts through participation with other texts and other discourses and who they look to become in their near and distant futures as well; to consider not just what literate artifacts are at present, but also the diverse range of uses and reuses they might have seen, the various representations and re-representations they have been worked through and coordinated with.


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Notes 1. Brian wished that his real name to be used when he volunteered to participate in this research in September of 2002. He continued to do so each year we continued this project and after reading the penultimate draft of this manuscript.


2. Prior (1998) defines literate activity in this way: ‘Literate activity . . . is not located in acts of reading and writing, but as cultural forms of life saturated with textuality, that is strongly motivated and mediated by texts’ (p. 138). 3. In another publication (Roozen, 2007), I partially traced other portions of the historical pathways these mathematical tools have charted across Brian’s multiple literate engagements. 4. Brian’s last name, Skaj, is pronounced ‘sky.’ Thus, ‘Go, Go, Mister Skaj, three one four five one nine’ is a kind of partial rhyming chant with the emphasis on the words ‘Skaj’ and ‘nine.’ 5. As I have pointed out in Roozen (2007), remediating mathematical discourse for use in the Poetry Slam and the Jumpers game also enhanced Brian’s performance in the advanced mathematics classes he was taking. When asked during his senior year how he would characterize any relationship he recognized between his use of mathematics for comedy and gaming and the work he was currently doing for his math classes, Brian stated, [i]t jogs my memory on older classes, and it makes me more fluent with the mathematics in case I one day teach it. It does now and then afford me a chance to rethink my understanding and iron out any wrinkles there might be. I think if anything my math-based comedy at BDEC shows is the biggest help. I really push myself on what I know off the top of my head, not just what I can regurgitate out of my notes. But all told, I think using my math knowledge mostly functions as another look at the material. And, the more times you see it, the more you know it. In working to encourage his students to use math in an eloquent manner, then, Brian drew heavily upon the very activities that had enhanced his own learning and mathematical fluency.


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‘On the Many Forms it Took throughout’: Engineering a Multipart, Multiple Site Rhetorical Event Jody Shipka University of Maryland at Baltimore County

The ‘making of’ any enterprise – films, skyscrapers, facts, political meetings, initiation rituals, haute couture, cooking – offers a view that is sufficiently different from the official one . . . Even more important, when you are guided to any construction site you are experiencing the troubling and exhilarating feeling that things could be different, or at least that they could still fail – a feeling never so deep when faced with the final product, no matter how beautiful or impressive it may be. Bruno Latour (2005, p. 89)

In ‘Through the Eyes of Researchers, Rhetors, and Audiences’ (2007), DePew points to the limitations of digital writing studies whose findings are based largely, if not entirely, on analyses of textual artifacts (that is, emails, web pages, and transcripts of online discussions), and argues that ‘we should be examining more features of the communicative situation rather than merely an artifact it produces’ (p. 52). While concentrating on the way textual analyses ‘eliminate or de-emphasize the human feature of digital writing’ (emphasis added, p. 67), DePew is certainly not the first within the field of writing studies to recognize that research methodologies and pedagogical practices that privilege the analysis of textual artifacts ignore the people, places, and processes that support the ‘ “making of” any enterprise’ (Latour, 2005, p. 89), rendering invisible the complex cycles of activity that link the production, distribution, exchange, consumption, and valuation of writing (Trimbur, 2000).


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In her 1990 critique of ‘strong-text conceptions of literacy’ (p. 104), for instance, Brandt compares the analysis of static artifacts – searches for stable ‘patterns in language-on-its-own’ – to ‘coming upon the scene of a party after it is over and everybody has gone home, being left to imagine from the remnants what the party must have been like’ (p. 76). Similarly, Sommers (1992) stresses the importance of theoretical and pedagogical frameworks that provide us with opportunities for ‘bringing life and writing together’ (p. 30), and suggests that ‘what happens between drafts’ (and to this I would add, what happens before, alongside, and after the drafts) may well be ‘one of the great secrets’ of the profession (p. 28). Like Brandt and Sommers, Brodkey (1996) has also pointed to the impact of seemingly static representations of writers and writing, arguing that the prevalence of images portraying writers-writing-alone, seemingly ‘removed from time and place,’ frozen at the moment of transcription, not only support the idea of textual autonomy but perpetuate as well the idea that ‘this and only this moment’ represents the whole of the activity of writing (p. 67, see also Trimbur, 2000). Of concern to Brodkey is that we learn to see, and to act, ‘by way of our picturing’ (Wartofsky, 1979, p. 206). As Brodkey (1996) writes: Having seen so many postcards of the Grand Canyon, we can hardly look at it, much less remember it, as anything other than glossy threeby-fives. It is likewise difficult to see or remember writing as other than it is portrayed in the scene of writing if that picture frames our experience and governs our memories [. . ..] It is not enough to say that it is only a picture, for such pictures provide us with a vocabulary for thinking about and explaining writing to ourselves and one another. (p. 62) While arguing that the image of the writer-writing-alone renders invisible ‘tensions between readers, writer, and texts’ (p. 60) and does little to explore the various reasons ‘why people write and under what circumstances’ (p. 80), Brodkey does not deny that there are occasions writers find themselves writing alone. Brodkey is not suggesting that we substitute this scene of writing with a more densely populated, noisier, technologically rich one. Instead, she urges readers to ‘tell new stories about the old picture, and to add pictures that tell altogether different stories about writers and writing’ (1987, p. 58).


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Like Brodkey, Prior (1998) argues that scenes of writing that allow for the ‘extraction of the figure of writing from the messy ground of the life world’ fail to provide us with an understanding of how ‘other texts, talk, perceptions, activities, and institutions might come into play in situated textual production and reception’ (p. 154). Prior too suggests we find ways to ‘teach ourselves away from dominant images of these scenes’ (p. 144), and to develop instead a ‘more nuanced, repertoire of terms, images and narratives to describe diverse forms of participation in textual production and reception’ (p. 146). For Prior, such participatory narratives would not only attend to the ‘real-time’ motives, tools, and activities of individuals or groups producing a text or collection of texts but would trace as well ‘the historical trajectories of the artifacts, practices and persons’ informing these scenes of production. In so doing, such narratives would highlight how the activity of making and negotiating meaning is ‘not only multimodal but also temporally and spatially dispersed and distributed across multiple persons, artifacts, and sites’ (1998, p. 137, see also Prior and Shipka, 2003). Prior’s point, and the point I am stressing here with Brandt’s party metaphor in mind, is that texts – like objects, events, conversations, performances or parties – have a history and are connected to, and informed by, other processes and systems of activity. Frameworks that allow for the extraction of a writer, text, object or performance ‘from the messy ground of the life world’ (Prior, 1998, p. 146) fail to provide an understanding of the messy, multimodal, historied dimensions of all communicative practice. It becomes far too easy to overlook the role other texts, talk, people, perceptions, semiotic resources, motives, activities, institutions, and so on play in the production, reception, circulation, and valuation of those ‘finished’ artifacts. When we fail to consider (or when our practices do not ask students to consider) the complex and highly distributed processes associated with the production of texts (or parties), we miss opportunities to explore how writing functions as one ‘stream within the broader flows of semiotic activity’ (Prior, 1998, p. 12; see also Medway, 1996). Elsewhere, my colleagues and I argued for a fuller engagement with multimodality, underscoring the crucial importance of attending to artifacts as well as the situated activity in which those artifacts are produced, circulated, received, and used. More specifically, we proposed shifting the focus from linguistic or discourse representation to semiotic remediation practices, and advocated that research designs examine the diverse ways that semiotic performances are recycled, redeployed, and transformed across modes, media, and chains of activity (Prior,


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Hengst, Roozen, and Shipka, 2006). In terms of the construction site analogy employed by Latour (2005) and offered at the start of this chapter, attending to semiotic remediation practices provides a way of challenging, while providing alternatives to, ‘official’ or text-based views of production. It does so by encouraging researchers to focus on the various sites in which, and complex processes by which, both texts and individuals come into being and to highlight how both are continually transformed, re-created, and remade. In keeping with those who have stressed the need to add to our existing repertoire still other images of writers and writing, this chapter offers an alternative way of viewing, if not an old scene of writing, then at least a somewhat familiar one, as it details the semiotic remediation practices three students employed while collaborating on a school-based task – one that resulted in the production of a multimodal, multipart, multiple site rhetorical event and that featured the use of original music, handwritten text, images, video, a live ‘coffeehouse style’ performance, and an interactive, cross-campus learning tour. Given the complex mix of resources, genres, and modes the students drew upon while completing the task, to refer to them as ‘writers’, or to suggest that the primary activity they engaged in was writing seems limiting, if not inaccurate. Instead, I find it useful to look to the concept of heterogeneous engineering and theories of play as a way of reconceptualizing these composers and their complex production practices.

Picturing semiotic remediation practices as heterogeneous engineering, as play In an essay that begins by asking how objects and artifacts come to be stabilized, taking on the shapes and forms they do, Law (1989) stresses the heterogeneity of elements involved in the process of technological problem solving, underscoring the complexity and contingency of the ways in which these various juxtaposed elements interrelate. Noting that the argument can be made that we are all heterogeneous engineers, ‘combining, as we do, disparate elements into the “ongoing concern” of our daily lives’ (n. 6, p. 133), Law focuses his attention on a large-scale system-building effort – that of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Portuguese maritime expansion. The work of heterogeneous engineers, or as Law sometimes refers to them, ‘system builders,’ requires them to juggle a wide range of variables – people, skills, material artifacts as well as natural phenomena – as they attempt to relate the variables in ‘an enduring whole’ (p. 113). As Bazerman (1999) argues, the concept


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For any technology to succeed (that is, to establish an enduring place within the world of human activities), it must not only succeed materially . . . ; it must also succeed symbolically (that is, adopt significant and stable meanings within germane discourse systems in which the technology is identified, given value, and made the objective of human attention and action). (p. 335) To better illustrate what he terms heterogeneous symbolic engineering, Bazerman, in his study of Thomas Edison, demonstrates how Edison and his associates were not only involved in the production of ‘stuff’ (such as electricity and light, lamps, generators, meters), but with making meaning as well. By ‘saying the right things at the right time . . . and creating the right representations to keep their project before the eyes and in the minds of the relevant parties’ (p. 333), Edison and his associates engineered value for their work, devising ways of influencing others to collaborate, endorse, and purchase those goods and services. As there is always likely to be ‘some degree of divergence between what the elements of a network would do if left to their own devices and what they are obliged, encouraged, or forced to do when they are enrolled within the network’ (Law, 1989, p. 114), heterogeneous engineers are challenged to anticipate and manage conflict to ensure that the various elements in the system remain in place – that they are not displaced, in other words, by other of the environment’s more dominant or willful actors. Heterogeneous engineers’ efforts are successful (that is, stable products are formed and workable solutions achieved) if the resulting assemblage of human and nonhuman entities ‘maintain[s] some degree of stability in the face of the attempts of other entities or systems to dissociate them into their component parts’ (Law, 1989, p. 129). As a means of dealing with the constraints posed by uncooperative or hostile forces, heterogeneous engineers might attempt to convert opponents into allies or replace one component of the system with another. As these problem-solving situations require that heterogeneous engineers work and think in increasingly resourceful and highly creative ways, there is, I would argue, something


of heterogeneous engineering need not be limited to the elements and processes involved with the production of durable goods or services, but can – and should – be expanded to encompass the production of symbols:


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decidedly playful about their work. More specifically, heterogeneous engineering requires of problem-solving system builders a level of flexibility and metacommunicative awareness some have closely associated with play. In contrast with those who consider play a luxury, the province of children, artists, or eccentrics, or an activity that is ‘free of the constraints of real life’ (p. 14), Csikszentmihalyi (1981) argues instead that play is not ‘an expendable luxury,’ but ‘the stuff of life,’ providing us with opportunities to experience freedom, transcendence, and growth (p. 24, see also Vygotsky, 1978; Wartofsky, 1979). A key component of the definition of play Csikszentmihalyi articulates concerns the player’s ability ‘to look at the world from a different angle’ (p. 24) – to simultaneously work with and against accepted or dominant perspectives and to consider how alternatives to existing goals, means, and processes point to other potentials for meaning, action, and interaction. Like others who argue for the developmental and liberatory potentials of play, Csikszentmihalyi (1981) maintains that play, far from involving a kind of imaginary free-for-all, ‘hinges on the contrast between two normative systems’ (p. 21) demanding of players a certain degree of awareness and flexibility as they attempt to ‘redefine reality, to set the context of goals and means within which action is meaningful’ (p. 25, see also Bateson, 1972; Hofstadter, 1985; Vygotsky, 1978; Wartofsky, 1979). Following Bateson, Csikszentmihalyi insists that play can only exist when there is an awareness of alternatives, ‘of two sets of goals and rules, one operating here and now [and] one that applies outside the given activity’ (p. 19). In his work on creativity and play, Hofstadter (1985) underscores the interconnectedness of a thing as it currently exists (in Csikszentmihalyi’s terms, as it operates under current or customary conditions) and that thing’s potential for otherness or difference. He does this by emphasizing the importance of one’s remaining cognizant of how existing themes or concepts – what Csikszentmihalyi might term realities or what Law (1989) terms systems or networks – ‘ “reaches out” towards things it is not’ (p. 254), thereby suggesting potentials for growth and transformation. Invested in challenging the myth of the solitary/asocial creative genius, Hofstadter maintains that ‘making variations’ on an existing concept or theme is ‘really the crux of creativity’ (p. 233). Likening a concept or theme to a ‘knobbed machine’ whose knobs can be ‘twiddled to produce a bewildering array of variations’ (p. 236), Hofstadter stresses the importance of seeing, and so, exploiting the


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Context contributes an unexpected quality to the knobs that are perceived on a given concept. The knobs are not displayed in a nice, neat little control panel, forevermore unchangeable. Instead, changing the context is like taking a tour around the concept, and as you get to see it from various angles, more and more of its knobs are revealed. [. . .] Once you have decided to try out a new way of viewing a phenomenon, you can let that view suggest a set of knobs to vary. The act of varying them will lead you down new pathways. (pp. 239, 254) That the pathways, potentials, and variations signaled through play are informed by – or offered as a response to – existing meanings, concepts, actions, and interactions suggests that play requires of players the flexibility and resourcefulness also demanded of heterogeneous engineers, particularly so when the latter attempt to address problems posed to an existing system by hostile or disruptive forces. I would underscore that disruption is crucial to making the connections I am proposing to forge between heterogeneous engineering and play. As Law (1989) notes, the argument might well be made that we are all heterogeneous engineers insofar as a good portion of our days are spent juggling, in an attempt to seamlessly align, a wide variety of human and nonhuman resources. When the specific resources we are most accustomed to working with or relying on are plentiful, when they are behaving as they should, much of this work goes unnoticed, unremarked upon – indeed, it may seem most unremarkable. As Latour (2005) has noted, breakdowns to an existing system occasion a different kind of action and awareness, particularly as one becomes more cognizant of the various components that must be, and must remain, in place to ensure such unremarkability. Whether changes to existing systems are occasioned by force (for example, having to take public transportation because one’s car has broken down and there are not funds for repair) or by choice (for example, deciding to start taking public transportation to help the environment), heterogeneous engineering requires of system builders the ability and willingness ‘to look at the world from a different angle’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1981, p. 24), to imagine other possibilities, potentials, and outcomes. Before examining how Bill, Brittany, and Shanna, three students in my spring 2006 Language and Society course, juggled a diverse array of resources while working on a group presentation task, I describe


potentials of the machine’s ‘deeply hidden knobs’ (p. 249). As Hofstadter explains:


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briefly how my sections of this upper-level course have been designed to facilitate pedagogically the disruptions and problem-solving opportunities I have so far associated generally with heterogeneous engineering and play. My sections of the course are subtitled ‘Considering Talk and Text in the Context of Other Tools: a Multimodal Approach to Communicative Practice.’ Here, theories of mediated activity, multimodality, and play not only inform the design of the course, but also represent much of the content that students read, discuss, use, and transform in their coursework. Throughout the semester, for example, students are asked to explore the complex relationship between speech, writing, and other of the rich communicative resources they routinely employ while making and negotiating meaning in the world. They are asked to consider, for instance, how images, movements, gestures, objects, colors, sounds, scents, and so on impact their interactions with (and their understanding of the potentials of) talk and text. Informed by Wertsch’s (1998) toolbox approach and discussions of privileging, students are asked to attend to what Wertsch identifies as ‘the array of mediational means to which people have access and the patterns of choice they manifest in selecting a particular means for a particular occasion’ (p. 94) – especially when others are, ‘in principle, imaginable’ (p. 124). Drawing on Hofstadter’s work on imagination, creativity, and play, students are asked to come up with (or imagine) two or three ways of approaching an assigned task. The course, thus, facilitates rhetorical and material flexibility by requiring that students attempt to imagine ‘possibilities surrounding what is’ (Hofstadter, 1985, p. 247) and to consider how an already existing theme, concept, idea, or interaction ‘reaches out toward things it is not’ (Hofstadter, 1985, p. 250). Asking students to come up with different ways of approaching a task – of coming up with variations on their own concepts or ideas for managing a task – ensures that they do more than consider patterns of privileging and the uptake of mediational means at a generally speaking or hypothetical level, but attend to when, how, and why, in the process of accomplishing their own work for the course, they chose one plan of action over others they had imagined. For each of the tasks assigned, students are also asked to compose a ‘Statement of Goals and Choices’ (SOGC). In these highly detailed reports students are asked to catalog and describe the various actors (both human and nonhuman) that played a role in helping them accomplish their work and to consider how people as well as things – objects, deadlines, workspaces, access to resources, belief systems, past experiences, and future goals – ‘authorize, allow, afford, encourage,


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permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on’ (Latour, 2005, p. 72) certain actions and outcomes.

The group presentation task itself requires students to devise ways of updating, extending, or remediating the ideas presented in the assigned course readings. In this way, presenters are not responsible for summarizing for their peers each of the assigned readings, but for coming up with ways of enacting, situating, or adapting the concepts associated with the materials. Bill, Brittany, and Shanna’s group had been assigned to work with three print-based texts, each of which focused on the importance of treating classrooms – the material spaces in which learning occurs as well as the activities, bodies, and relationships typically associated with those spaces – as readable/interpretable text: Corno’s (1989) ‘What it Means to be Literate about Classrooms,’ Nelson’s (1995) ‘Reading Classrooms as Text,’ and Brooke’s (1987) ‘Underlife and Writing Instruction.’ Like other tasks the students receive, this task encourages them to forge connections among the theories and concepts explored in the readings, class discussion, and their own lived experience, interests, communicative strengths, and access to resources. As the case study demonstrates, the group’s approach to the task was informed, at least in part, by their fondness for coffee/coffeehouses, their interest in disrupting the class’s normal routine, and their desire to foreground Brittany’s talents as a singer/songwriter. As I was present at a number of the group’s planning sessions as well as being a participant in both parts of the group’s presentation (I also filmed the second part, or the ‘coffeehouse session’), my analysis is shaped by what I experienced and recorded during those meetings. The details presented in the case study, however, will be drawn from a music video the group created and the 60-plus pages of SOGC that Bill, Brittany, and Shanna produced as a way of documenting and reflecting upon the goals they set and the strategies they employed while working on the presentation. While the students’ SOGCs provide rich views of multiple spaces in which, and various semiotic resources with which, the students worked during the six weeks they devoted to the task, my treatment of the group’s semiotic remediation practices will focus on three segments of their overall process, segments that the group members indicated were key in terms of helping them determine how they would accomplish


This place feels kind of like home: on the making of a group presentation


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the task. The first episode traces the group’s movements through various spaces across campus as they attempt to find ways of using the ideas presented in the assigned texts as the basis of a series of interactive, hands-on experiences that took the form of a cross-campus ‘learning tour.’ The second episode details how the group members, working together at Brittany’s house, transformed the text- and image-based data they collected from their peers during the learning tour into an original song and music video. The final episode details the students’ activities on the final day of their presentation and examines the decisions they made as they transformed an otherwise empty room on campus into what one group member described as a kind of ‘laid-back’ coffeehouse/music club. Taken together, these strips of activity highlight the ways these students juggled a wide range of resources, attempting to forge them into a more or less enduring whole while remaining mindful of still other possibilities, potentials, and outcomes for their work. After reading Corno, Nelson, and Brooke: toward the creation of a scene The group’s first face-to-face meeting was initiated by Bill over email. The three met at a coffee shop on campus the evening of February 23 to discuss the readings and begin generating ideas of how they might use them as the basis of a 75-minute, in-class presentation. Shanna recalled being ‘struck’ by a point from Corno’s (1989) text about how classrooms are often read and understood based on their physical design. This point, coupled with Brooke’s (1987) study of student underlife and identity, suggested to Shanna the possibility of taking the class out of its normal meeting place (or radically altering the way the room was typically arranged) and then providing her classmates with specific roles or identities they would have to assume during the class session. Like Shanna, Bill and Brittany were interested in exploring the potentials associated with holding class somewhere besides the normal classroom – to disrupt the class’s normal routine and then to observe, much as Brooke had done in his study of college writers, how their peers interacted. Seeing potentials to forge connections between their assigned readings and readings assigned at the start of the semester, the group considered creating a presentation that would cater to different learning styles. By the end of the first meeting, Bill said they had the come up with the following, however tentative, plan of action:


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We knew we wanted to create a different experience and discussed creating three different classrooms. One would be a sort of control


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As much as the group liked the idea of relocating the class, they wondered if they would be able to secure three empty rooms during one of the busiest days and times of the week. Even if they could find three rooms that were free when our class met, they doubted they would have time to transform those rooms before class began. Complicating matters still further, the three classrooms/three different lessons plan did not appear to afford them the possibility of integrating into their presentation their classmates’ reactions to the various kinds of classrooms and teaching styles. To accomplish what they were envisioning, they would need two 75-minute class sessions – one when the class would experience each of the classrooms and one when the class could discuss their experience. The group met the following day, and Bill proposed that instead of trying to find and transform three rooms and creating from scratch three different lesson plans, they might have the class visit other classrooms on campus. As he explained in his SOGC: I remembered that in my Intercultural Communications class last semester [the professor] discussed ways in which individual and cultural isolates, sets, and patterns could influence the ways in which we can make meaning of our interpersonal or intercultural communications. It hit me that this idea was very similar to the ‘reading of classrooms’ theory which was one of the bases of our group’s project. It was then that I got the idea of allowing actual professors to teach lessons to our classmates rather than look for empty rooms in which to teach them ourselves. That morning Bill had checked the online course schedule and confirmed that two of his former professors, including the one referenced above, were teaching at the time our class met. Bill felt reasonably confident that if Brittany and Shanna shared his enthusiasm about having the class visit other classrooms, his former professors might be willing to participate. The idea appealed to Brittany and Shanna and the three began looking for a third professor who would agree to let us to sit in and observe his/her class. Still interested in doing something that would


classroom, basically ‘traditional’ with linear rows of seats and a teacher in the front. The second would be really loud and overload the senses. Another would be really chill, like a coffeehouse. We figured that we could teach the same material in each of the classrooms but each in a different way.


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cater to visual learners, they headed for the Art and Design department to see if they could secure the third stop on the learning tour. On the way to the Art and Design department, the three came upon a sound-based experimental art exhibit called What Sound Does a Color Make?, and they discussed briefly, and half-jokingly at first, the possibility of making the exhibit the final stop on the tour. Reflecting on the potential of this serendipitous find, Shanna wrote in her SOGC: At first I doubted whether we could really make it work and feared that it might turn into something cool but pointless. But the more I thought about it, the more I loved it. It made sense to take the class somewhere that did not follow the ‘traditional’ classroom/learning/teaching structure to see how they made sense of this space (i.e., whether or not they read it as a classroom even though it was not necessarily structured as such and lacked the presence of an identifiable teacher). Despite sending out a number of email requests – requests in which the group members explained what they were hoping to accomplish with the tour – the group was unable to find a third professor willing to participate. Rather than limit the tour to two learning spaces, the group decided that the exhibit would, in fact, be the final stop on the tour. Still concerned that one 75-minute class session would not provide the class with enough time to experience and discuss the learning tour, the group asked if I would be willing to allow them two class sessions for their presentation. I agreed. Allotting two sessions to the presentation served an additional benefit insofar as it allowed the group the opportunity to devise ways of integrating the experience of the tour into the final part of their presentation. ‘With guitar in hand and blue books on the table’: setting the tour to music The learning tour itself took place on Thursday, March 9, during the class session prior to the group’s original presentation date. Bill, Brittany, and Shanna were hoping to use their classmates’ reactions to the tour as the basis of the second part of their presentation, so it was important that the other members of the class not know that the learning tour was connected to the group’s presentation. I told the class instead that the day’s activity was connected to the concept of selective contextualization (Lemke, 1989) that we had recently been discussing in class. Before the tour began, I provided each member of the class with a blue book, asked


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them jot down notes on how they were ‘reading or making sense of’ the experience we were about to have, and explained that we would examine together the blue books during another class session. In this way, students were cautioned not to write anything in their blue books that they were not prepared to share with others. We spent approximately 20 minutes in each of the spaces the group had arranged for us to visit – a linguistics class, an education course, and the art exhibit. At the end of the session, I collected the blue books and Brittany picked them up from me later that day. The group had originally planned to meet on campus to look over the blue books and plan the next part of the presentation, but Brittany suggested instead an alternate location: ‘With guitar in hand and blue books on the table, I requested the presence of Shanna and Bill at my [parents’] home. My guitar is here and as much as I love being on campus, I didn’t want to lug my guitar there and have everyone staring at me while I’m trying to play.’ The group had decided weeks before, during that first face-to-face meeting in fact, that they wanted to incorporate music into their presentation, and the blue books provided them with more than enough material for an original song. The desire to have a musical component in their presentation had to do, in part, with the original plan – to create lessons that would appeal to different types of learning styles. But they were also hoping to find ways to showcase Brittany’s talents as a songwriter and musician, and writing a song about the class – one that Brittany would perform live for the class – seemed to them a fitting way to accomplish both goals. Although Brittany would be largely responsible for creating the music and lyrics for the song, the group together determined what the song would be about and how it would incorporate the text and images from their blue books. Of this part of the collaborative process, Shanna wrote in her SOGC: We knew we were going to write a song, so we started looking for inspiration. We sat on Brittany’s back porch, reading over the blue books and sharing our ideas and what struck us. We decided to each take a couple of the books and kind of catalog on a separate sheet of paper the quotes that seemed to be profound or applicable to the readings and the message we were trying to produce.


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Brittany described how Bill ‘essentially directed [her] songwriting process,’ creating a ‘flowchart of sorts’ based on the notes the three had generated. Unfortunately, Bill’s original flow chart was lost. In his SOGC,


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however, Bill described how he came up with the idea of ‘generalizing the themes [in the blue books] that were common in the students’ experiences and mapping out the way the song [and later the video] might unfold.’ The storyline Bill recalled having sketched out during that meeting is offered below (Figure 3.1). Here, Bill’s storyline is juxtaposed with blue book text and images that inspired the storyline – text

We started off in a comfortable, familiar setting but knew we had to leave.

We walked toward a destination but did not know where [we were going].

We got there – we were unsure if we belonged there, but we got somewhat comfortable before we had to leave again, etc.


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Figure 3.1 Bill’s storyline from his Statement of Goals and Choices on the left juxtaposed with text and images from different students’ blue books on the right



and images that would also be featured in the music video the group created later that weekend. To better illustrate how her peers’ experience of the learning tour was transformed into song, Brittany appended to her SOGC two annotated copies of the song lyrics. One version of the lyrics, entitled ‘Blue Book Perspective Translation’ (Figure 3.2), features the final lyrics on the left. The right side of the page contains the specific ideas – whether originally conveyed in words or images – that the group took from the blue books. The version entitled ‘My Personal Translation’ (Figure 3.3) contains the final lyrics juxtaposed with Brittany’s response to and remediation of the ideas offered by her peers. To illustrate a bit of the transformation process, the following text represents a part of the group’s notes on what their peers recorded in their blue books: ‘Shipka says it’s time to go to another room. We walk up another flight of stairs. I wonder where we’re going. I don’t like all this moving around. This new room is not fun like [the other].’ Those impressions and feelings were translated or, as Bill put it, ‘generalized’ in the following text: ‘I feel like I’ve “overstayed my welcome” in this new place. I know in my heart I need to keep pushing forward. I’m still not certain yet. I can’t seem to follow an even, straight path. I’m losing hope. I just want to sleep my life away.’ And finally, that translation was reworked as the lyrics for stanzas three and four of


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Figure 3.2 A segment of ‘Blue Book Perspective Translation’


Figure 3.3

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A segment of ‘My Personal Translation’

the song: ‘A little bit of time passes me by/Signal to move on catches my eye/So I take a walk up a few more flights/Thinking I’ll understand when I get there/Feeling like I’m on a rollercoaster/And this is the low point of the ride/Might as well be asleep on the inside.’ Although the group had only planned to meet for a couple hours that evening, the session lasted seven hours, until well after midnight. While part of this time was spent analyzing the blue books and working on the song, part of the time, Brittany recalled, was spent just ‘hanging out’: We relaxed. We told stories of our pasts. I made two new best friends. I know this may not seemingly have a lot to do with our project, but it really does. I became so much more comfortable with these people. I knew they were nice, but I didn’t really know them. Comfort plays a huge factor in songwriting. After that evening, I knew it would be a breeze.


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By the time Bill and Shanna left, all that had been written was the song’s title. Feeling tired and a bit ‘slap-happy,’ but thinking it might be easier to work with no one around, Brittany continued working on the song that night. Although she admitted using Bill’s outline to ‘jump-start’ the storyline, she said she knew, ‘after writing the first verse,’ exactly what the song would say and where it would end: ‘I likened our class’s



adventure to my personal experiences of leaving home, discovering something about myself (whether it be enlightening or not), and eventually ending up right back where I started.’ The group met at Brittany’s house again the following day and she played the song for Shanna and Bill, soliciting their feedback. Neither Shanna nor Bill wanted to add to or alter anything about the song, so Brittany went back up to her room to begin recording it while Shanna and Bill began working on the second component of their presentation – a video that would juxtapose Brittany’s song with various bits of text and images taken from the blue books. Shanna recalled discussing with Bill their options for producing the video and deciding on how, specifically, they would translate the data into video form. Again, it is important to note that no one in the class knew that the learning tour was the first part of the group’s presentation, so the song and video were intended to do the work of conveying to their classmates that the group had, in fact, orchestrated the tour and used the blue book data as the basis for the second part of the presentation. As Shanna explained in her SOGC: We decided to use quotes and images from the blue books that inspired parts of the song. We used the list we made the night before to decide which quotes and images best matched up with the lyrics. We thought it would be neat to use the quotes in the actual handwriting of its author. If we did this people would recognize their own comments in the video, whereas if we wrote or typed them they may not have recognized the quotes as their own. By the end of this meeting, the group decided that the second part of the presentation would begin with Brittany performing the song the group had written. Following this, lyrics for the song would be passed out and discussed briefly, mainly to see if any of their peers were able to make connections between the learning tour and the second part of the presentation. The group would then play the video for the class and spend the remainder of the session discussing with their peers what they experienced during the learning tour. In preparation for the second part of the presentation, each member of the group agreed to take on a different task: Bill would take the text and images he and Shanna had scanned into his thumb drive and produce the video; Brittany would finish recording the song, adding the guitar and back-up vocals tracks; and Shanna would generate a list of questions or talking points that the three would use to guide discussion.


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The second part of the group’s presentation, the coffeehouse session, took place the following Tuesday, March 14. The session was held, not in our usual classroom, but in a large, carpeted but otherwise usually empty room in a building on campus that had once (prior, that is, to the university’s gaining approval for and subsequently constructing across campus a newer, bigger, better version of the building) served as one, if not the, central social space on campus. All three of the group members arrived to campus early that day and began transforming the room into something they hoped their peers would be able to read, understand, and so navigate as a coffeehouse/music club. It was important to all three group members that they do what they could to make the room look as authentic as possible (in keeping with the assigned readings, they wanted the physical aspects of the room to read ‘coffeehouse/club’), and many of the choices they made transforming the room were based on this desire for verisimilitude. As a result of the ‘numerous telephone, IM, and email communications the group exchanged throughout the entire planning process,’ Bill explained in his SOGC: We had a pretty good idea of how the coffeehouse performance and discussion would go. We all planned to bring various items from home including pillows, comforters, a lava lamp and other items to create the scene of a coffeehouse. Brittany had decided that the room would work best if the class was seated facing the wall instead of the ‘front’ of the room. The wall was a much larger surface onto which the video could be projected, and it eliminated the ‘feel’ of an academic space which would have resulted from the presence of a screen and podium at the front of the room. We delegated Shanna to start setting up the room to ensure the projector wouldn’t be stolen while Brittany and I went to the cars to pick up and carry into the room all stuff [we had brought from home]. Once all the ‘decorations’ had been moved into the room, Brittany and Shanna began creating the seating and stage areas and setting up a table for the coffee and refreshments. They adjusted the lighting in the room ‘in order to avoid the harsh fluorescent lighting that classrooms usually have and to better simulate the laid-back atmosphere of a coffeehouse,’ and created a ‘lounging area,’ arranging pillows and comforters on the floor in front of the ‘stage area’ – the latter signified by a single


‘If you give me my coffeehouse, I’ll give you music’: transforming UC 310



Figure 3.4 Stage area of ‘coffeehouse’

folding chair with a guitar placed on one side, a lava lamp on the other. They then arranged what few chairs actually came with the room into a semicircle behind the pillowed area for those who might not be willing or able to experience the session seated in the lounging area (Figures 3.4 and 3.5). As Shanna and Brittany worked on the room, Bill attempted to deal with a disruption the group had not anticipated. Assuming that the projection cart they booked for the session would come with both a projector and a computer, Bill called the A/V Department and learned that it would cost 40 dollars to have a computer brought up to the room. Although he had brought his laptop to class with him, his processor was not powerful enough to play the video full-screen. Unable to justify the extra money it would cost to project the video full-screen as originally planned, the group decided that they would show ‘a less-than-full screen showing of the video,’ and offer to make copies of the video for those who wanted to view it full-screen. As their classmates arrived, Brittany met them at the door, checking university IDs and stamping hands before permitting anyone entry to the space. Deciding to have someone play the ‘bouncer role’ was yet another ‘element in helping to authenticate the experience’ – another way of signaling to their peers that the room was to be read and understood as a coffeehouse/club. Having a bouncer at the door had originally


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Figure 3.5

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Seating area of ‘coffeehouse’

been Bill’s idea and it was a role he had been looking forward to playing, having brought with him a black blazer that he planned on changing into after the room had been set up. Problems with the projection cart had put things behind schedule, and Bill was still at the coffee shop on campus picking up coffee for the session when his classmates began to arrive.

Discussion: of resources transformed, managed, and brought into alignment As Prior and Hengst note in their introduction to this collection, multimodality has primarily been treated as an issue of composed artifacts, of representational forms, rather than as situated practice or engagement in processes (see also Prior et al., 2006). When multimodality is treated only or chiefly as an aspect of seemingly stable ‘finished’ artifacts – this as opposed to viewing multimodality an integral part of semiotic remediation practices – one runs the risk of overlooking the fundamentally multimodal aspects of all communicative practice. At the start of her SOGC, for instance, Shanna emphasizes how the process of planning and facilitating the presentation was a ‘very


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dynamic thing, always changing and evolving.’ She goes on to note how the planning sessions and the experience of the tour ‘continued to restructure the project and the many forms it took throughout.’ To be sure, considering alternative ways of accomplishing the task and its various subcomponents proved to be an integral part of the group’s collaborative process as they worked to come up with ways of using the assigned materials as the basis of a shared group experience and then, later, to devise ways of sharing with their classmates their remediations of the data they collected during the learning tour. As Shanna’s comments suggest, that the group was able to work both purposefully and playfully – to engineer plans of action with specific goals or outcomes in mind while remaining cognizant of, and open to, exploring what different combinations of human and nonhuman resources might afford – continually provided them with the challenges of, and opportunities for, reimagining their presentation’s purpose, scope, and direction. Viewed from a text-based, or final product perspective – again, what Latour might call its official view – the coffeehouse session was a success. Despite the problems with the projector and Bill not being able to change into his blazer in time to ‘work the front door,’ an analysis of the footage recorded during the session would suggest it went pretty much as the group had planned. Yet as Latour (2005) cautions, the official view is necessarily partial. It does not allow us to see nor does it typically ask us to consider how ‘things could be different,’ or how they ‘could still fail’ (p. 89). Attending to the processes by which the group attempted to address the challenges associated with the group presentation task provides us with a more nuanced understanding of the various, and oftentimes competing, motives and goals impacting their working process, highlighting the different strategies and heterogeneous assortment of resources, both human and nonhuman, the group thought to take up – sometimes successfully, sometimes not, in an attempt to satisfy those goals. In terms of the coffeehouse session, the official view also fails to provide much insight as to how the group occasioned specific transformations or how they managed detours and breakdowns in the system while trying to stabilize or successfully bring into alignment specific assemblages of resources. Certainly, the class was given some insight into the group’s remediation processes during the coffeehouse session when the group members discussed with their peers why they decided to engineer the learning tour, how they wrote the song and created the video, and so on. Yet one aspect of the project that was not discussed had to do with how the art exhibit came to be the final stop on the tour.


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Because Bill appended to his SOGC copies of the emails he exchanged with an art professor the group was hoping to recruit for the tour, I was made aware of the contributions made by someone who, again, if not for the appended emails or the brief mention Bill makes of the exchanges with her in his SOGC, would have been rendered invisible, seemingly a nonfactor in the overall process narrative. Instead, I am left to consider how the tour, the lyrics, the song, the video, and the coffeehouse session might have turned out differently had she agreed to participate, or had the group not happened upon the art exhibit on the way to her office or not pursued the option of replacing her with the self-guided art exhibit. Finally, the official view also fails to tell us much about the affective, interpersonal, or historical dimensions of the group’s process. This, in turn, carries with it the suggestion that how one feels – whether happy, sad, disappointed, distracted, or ‘slap-happy’ – is of little importance or has little bearing on the kind and quality of work one is able to accomplish. Brittany’s disclaimer, ‘I know this may not seemingly have a lot to do with our project . . .’ is telling. It seems to suggest an awareness that sharing with the teacher-as-evaluator how not working, how ‘kicking back,’ having fun and getting to know those with whom one has been assigned to work might seem inappropriate, or, at best, only tangentially related to the ‘real work’ of schooling. Like Brittany, both Bill and Shanna described in their SOGC how enjoying one another’s company and being able to work well together impacted what they were able to accomplish, the amount of extra work they were willing to take on, and so on. Yet unlike Brittany, neither Bill nor Shanna was particularly pleased to learn that the course had a required group presentation component. While Bill’s primary concern was that he would inevitably be assigned to a group of ‘slackers’ (as he had been in other classes), Shanna admitted that she, like Bill, and for similar reasons, ‘was not usually fond of group presentations,’ but also noted that she lived an hour and a half from campus. The time, effort, and cost involved with her commute greatly impacted her attitude, at least at first, about the collaborative project. She recalled attending the first meeting hoping that the group would come close to finalizing their plans for the presentation so that she would not have to make extra trips to campus for face-to-face meetings. By the end of the meeting, ‘after talking about ourselves and getting to know each other more,’ Shanna wrote, ‘I knew I’d come up to campus on days that I didn’t have class.’ I am not suggesting that one enjoyable group presentation experience made converts of Bill or Shanna. Rather, my aim is to underscore how one’s history with particular kinds of school-based tasks or access to resources – in Shanna’s


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case, the distance she lived from campus – can impact how one works and the attitudes and expectations one brings to that work.

As this chapter provides readers with an alternate way of viewing, if not an old picture, at least a familiar one, I would be remiss if I were to conclude without recognizing how the account of semiotic remediation practices offered here might have turned out differently – how it might have detailed the transformation of other scenes and spaces, or how it might have highlighted the input and impact of still other human and nonhuman actors operating on other timescales (Law, 1989; Lemke, 2005; Scollon, 2005). As Law’s work reminds us, determining which system or which elements within the system to foreground is crucial because this determination allows researchers to focus on certain aspects of the system while backgrounding the participation of others. Borrowing Hofstadter’s (1985) metaphor of the ‘knobbed machine,’ I conclude by indicating some of the ways the narrative or theme offered here ‘reaches out toward what it is not’ (p. 254), suggesting the possibility of tracing other pathways, potentials, and remediations – of adding still other images of composers and composing practices to the mix. In an attempt to set limits to my analysis, I focused on one group presentation that occurred during the spring 2006 semester. To further limit my analysis, I chose to examine three strips of activity that occurred within a six-week span of time, beginning with Bill’s email to the group and concluding with the coffeehouse session. By drawing on the group members’ SOGCs, I attempted to privilege their understandings of the import and purpose of what they were trying to achieve. Given that I have used the same assignment for ten years, at three different institutions, in four different courses, variations on this theme might entail focusing on other presentations, institutions, groups of students, or assigned readings. Similarly, I might have offered an account of how the task itself as well as the kind and quality of presentations that tend to result from it have changed over time – largely as a result of my having more examples from which to draw when introducing the task to each new group of students. Variations on the specific narrative offered here might entail altering, expanding, or further limiting the number of episodes treated here or adding to the mix responses from other members of the class, from the professors or students whose classes we visited during the tour, or from the group members’ family


Variations on this theme: on alternate systems of activity and points of view


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and friends. The time frame itself might also be expanded or adjusted in ways that allow for a more in-depth treatment of the group members’ histories of, and attitudes toward, school-based tasks, including but not limited to group tasks. Given the degree to which Brittany and Bill, in particular, found ways of capitalizing on their strengths and interests while completing this task (for Brittany, it was singing/songwriting, for Bill it was video design and production), other knobs that might be twiddled could involve examining how creating a song or video in this context compares with creating them at other times, for other audiences and purposes. Yet another variation might involve beginning the analysis with the coffeehouse session and then tracing the different ways the song, video, and footage recorded during the session have been remediated by the group members, by another member of the class, or even by me, in my own teaching and scholarship, as I am doing here. For instance, wanting to ‘give something back’ to the professors and students who participated in the learning tour, Bill created a website to thank people for participating and offered a detailed explanation of what the group had been attempting to accomplish with the tour and coffeehouse session. Site visitors were given the option of watching the video and encouraged to email the group with any questions or responses they might have. Bill went on to use the video and the experience of the tour and coffeehouse session as the basis for a multimodal project for his education class where the goal was to come up with three different ways of representing the same information, and he created for his final project in my class an alternative version of the video, replacing the original soundtrack with audio recorded during the coffeehouse discussion. Brittany featured the song for a time on her page at myspace.com, and another member of the class used the song and audio taken from the footage recorded during the coffeehouse session in her final project for my course. If, following Scollon (2005), we examine a moment of action (or, as I have done here, several moments of action) from the point of view of the many other cycles circulating through it, other knobs are revealed. To take as an example the two and a half minute span of time during which Brittany performed the song in the coffeehouse session, we may see the meaning or significance of this performance differently depending on whether we consider it in terms of her history of being a student, a singer/songwriter, a guitar player, an English major, a member of the spring 2006 course, Bill’s and Shanna’s friend, or an employee at a surf shop. This is not to say that the only variations worth pursuing privilege the individual’s point of view. It is possible to add still


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other pictures to the mix when a moment in action is considered with a mind toward other (nonhuman) histories, life spans, or points of view – that, for example, of the room in which the coffeehouse session was held, the projection cart, the pillows and blankets, the lava lamp, Brittany’s guitar, or the chair upon which she sat while she played. The fabric woven by these semiotic remediations is both densely layered and widely dispersed in time and space.


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Negotiating Moral Stance in Classroom Discussion about Literature: Entextualization and Contextualization Processes in a Narrative Spell Mary M. Juzwik Michigan State University

‘I was in the store the other day and the clerk was ignoring me. She was waiting on a person over here and then she went to wait on a person over here. And after she did this twice, and I had been there first, I spoke up and I said, ‘Excuse me, am I invisible?’ ‘You said that?’ ‘Yes, to the clerk. And she looked at me, she said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ I said, ‘I was waiting, I was here first.’ And she wasn’t going to acknowledge me until I spoke up. And it . . . reminded me again, that there are people out there that are going to try to take advantage of me and be mean [and] . . . disrespectful to me [because I’m Mexican].’ (Susan Gomez, in an English classroom discussion with 7th graders) Everyday narratives of personal experience elaborately encode and perpetuate moral worldviews. Personal narratives generally concern life incidents in which a protagonist has violated social expectations. Recounting the violation and taking a moral stance towards it provide a discursive forum for human beings to clarify, reinforce, or revise what they believe and value. In this sense, personal narrative is akin to prayer in that both imbue experience with moral direction . . . personal narrative provides a secular, interactive means of building a


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English as a school subject has evolved not just as the study of language, literature, or literacy, but as a forge for the identity work of ‘making people people’ (Brass, 2006). In the United States, a historical moral mandate has accompanied ‘doing English’ in K-12 public schooling and continues today in residual forms. Brandt (2004)1 and Applebee (1974) both trace how, historically, literary reading instruction was motivated by the desire for the moral improvement of students. This meant that the teacher herself needed to be a moral model, above reproach, for students to emulate. Although the nature of this moral mandate has changed over time, contemporary English classrooms continue to offer a curricular location where teachers and students explore moral dilemmas and questions of right and wrong through conversation, writing, drama, and other literate activity (Applebee, 1996). This is one reason why, for example, debates about censorship in schools tend to focus on the discipline of English and on texts adopted and taught in English classes. Literary discussion has emerged as a literate practice for accomplishing the contemporary moral aims of ‘doing English.’ The art of literary discussion goes back at least to the salons of prerevolutionary Europe (Craveri, 2005), where it represented an elite practice: a leisured, calmly literate, noble way of life in which the ‘art of self-presentation’ (Craveri, p. 10) was cultivated and prized.2 In contemporary research on English education, Nystrand (1997) defined discussion as ‘the free exchange of information among students and/or between at least three students and the teacher that lasted at least a half minute’ (p. 36). The value of such ‘open’ discussion is largely agreed upon among classroom literacy researchers, for a range of reasons. Compelling correlational research shows student achievement to be greater in discussion-rich classrooms than in those where little or no discussion occurs (Applebee, Langer, Nystrand, and Gamoran, 2003; Nystrand, 1997). Research finds high levels of student engagement in discussion-rich classrooms (Kelly, 2008). Researchers also theorize discussion as a tool for curricular permeability (Dyson, 1993), whereby students with a range of backgrounds and literate resources may voice a place for themselves on the classroom stage (Juzwik, Nystrand, Kelly, and Sherry, 2008). Finally, reading and discussing literature remains a literate practice in which participants


moral philosophy of how one ought to live. Across time and communities, people recount a personal narrative to instantiate a moral point of view. (Ochs and Capps, 2001, pp. 45–6)


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may discover and express their identities, a phenomenon enacted in English classrooms and also put on display in the cultural phenomenon of the Oprah Book Club (Smith, 2003). Rather than following the more usual practice in the educational research literature of conceptualizing and exploring discussion strictly in terms of discursive moves (for example, questioning practices [Nystrand, Wu, Gamoran, Zeiser, and Long, 2003], participant examples [Wortham, 2006], or narratives [Juzwik, 2006]), this chapter considers literary discussion, and the identity work therein, as a process of semiotic remediation. It does so by focusing on a particular remediation practice embedded within discussions in a middle school English language arts classroom: the narrative spell. I ask: How do participants in narrative spells accomplish the social and disciplinarily appropriate work of moral stance-taking and identifying in English class? To explore this question, I trace processes of entextualization and contextualization (Bauman and Briggs, 1990; Gumperz, 1982; Silverstein and Urban, 1996) through which participants recycled and redesigned semiotic resources including themes, gestures, and constructed dialogues to fashion morally virtuous performances of identity within a narrative spell.

Background From narrative to narrative spells In the sociolinguistic literature, narrative has long been linked with identity work (see Gee, 1985; Hymes, 1981; Labov, 1972, 1982; Linde, 1993; Schiffrin, 2000; Tannen, 2005). In a wide-ranging review of this work, Ochs and Capps (2001) theorized how narratives mediate social roles and relationships in interaction. They identified moral stance as one crucial dimension for understanding how, through the stories they tell and co-tell, narrators present themselves and others in a morally valenced world. Conversational narratives allow tellers to evaluate the lives and choices of themselves and others, to articulate versions of how the world ought to be, and to express how persons (themselves and their interlocutors included) ought to comport themselves in that world. In taking moral stances through narrative, individuals present themselves as ‘good and proper persons’ (Linde, 1993) within the story worlds (narrated events) and – perhaps more importantly – within the face-to-face interactions in which stories are told (narrative events). This narrated event/narrative event distinction indicates the importance of considering referential dimensions of narrative performances


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(narrated events), as well as interactional dimensions (narrative events). Research on classroom interaction, on my reading, has a tendency to focus on one or the other, but attention to the multifunctionality of narrative-in-interaction is critical for observing how moral stances unfold. In recent empirical work, Bamberg (2004, 2006) and Georgakopoulou (2007) build on the work of Ochs and Capps to identify and describe a particular type of conversational narrative: the small story. Small stories depart from the canonical narratives studied in sociolinguistics in several ways: they tend to be short rather than ‘fully formed’, they include a range of types of narrative (vicarious, hypothetical, and so on) beyond the classical narrative of personal experience idealized by Labov (1972), they tend to occur in situations beyond the research interview, and they tend to be analyzed as interactionally embedded in conversation rather than as purely formal texts. Tracking moral stance-taking within short stories embedded in conversation allows for consideration of identity not as a static, stable, ‘god-given’ construct, but rather as a dynamic, emergent process. To focus on identity work as process in classroom settings, I favor the verb ‘identify’ (or the nominalization of the verb, ‘identification’) to the noun ‘identity.’ Over time, solidified roles develop through the accumulation of stories an individual tells and stories told about her (Georgakopoulou, 2008; Sfard and Prusak, 2005). I return to this possibility in the discussion. The focus of this analysis is not so much single narratives, or even the accumulation of narratives individuals tell over longer timescales (Lemke, 2000). Rather, I focus on the narrative spell, which colleagues and I defined as occurring ‘when a string of at least three stories was uttered by three or more interlocutors around a coherent topic or theme’ (Juzwik et al., 2008, p. 1142). Although the narrative spell depends, by definition, on discrete narratives, it is primarily a unit of social interaction. In a case study of Susan Gomez’s English instruction, we documented that narrative spells were pervasive: 21 occurred during 10 focal class periods we studied. Narrative spells, we argued, were instances of ‘highly attuned responses to others’ (p. 1144), functioning as a dialogic resource for teachers and students to enact identities as good and proper persons within the practice of literary discussion. Thus narrative spells are a serial remediation process within discussion where identifying narrative performances dialogue with one another. Note that there is a hint of ‘magic’ in the term ‘spell’ and this seems suitable: in my observation, and documented in the narrative research, participants tend to


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get caught up in the aesthetic moment and in the poetics of serial narrative performances. This is why skillful story performers are said to be ‘mesmerizing’ or ‘spellbinding’ (Bauman, 1977; Juzwik, in press). For the purposes of this chapter, however, I treat the narrative spell as an analytic unit for a broader reconsideration of the semiotic dimensions of literary discussion. Contextualization and entextualization processes within narrative spells The notion of conversational contextualization was proposed by sociolinguist Gumperz (1982), who argued that, in studying conversational interactions, ‘activity’ or ‘activity type’ should be used as a unit of analysis (p. 131). In this framework, participants use conversational cues, or contextualization cues, to signal and interpret situational frames as they are negotiated ‘on the fly’ by participants in conversation. Gumperz directed attention to a focus on the in-process dynamics enacted by participants in conversational interaction, rather than on static linguistic variables signaling membership in particular speech communities. This notion was further developed by Bauman and Briggs (1990), by some papers in Duranti and Goodwin (1992), and by the collection of papers in Silverstein and Urban (1996). This body of work showed how the construct of contextualization could respond to the indeterminacy-of-context problem in socially oriented research in language and linguistics: if context is critical to analysis of activity type, then how is context bounded for an analysis? These scholars proposed that, rather than treat context as a static variable, or set of variables (like a list), researchers analyze contextualization as a cultural practice by which participants fluidly distinguish and co-construct texts/contexts or signs/environments in everyday practice (cf. de Certeau, 1984). What counts as text – for example, a narrative that may be told, retold, and responded to over time – is thus a process of foregrounding and backgrounding negotiated by persons in socioculturally contingent processes. Contextualization processes involve collaboratively constructing the background, whereas entextualization involves defining the foreground. Entextualization, as a process that works in tandem with contextualization processes (especially decontextualization, described below), entails rendering the foregrounded bit of discursive/semiotic activity into a text, through various poetic resources such as those described by Labov (1972), Ochs and Capps (2001), and others, but also through semiotic resources such as gesture, physical location, and so on.


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Rather than strict formal analysis of linguistic texts, the focus of study that follows from this theory turns to (a) moves and other signs by which persons interactionally cordon off segments of discourse and other semiotic forms as texts that are detachable from the more general sea of semiosis, and (b) cues by which persons contextualize their interaction to signal salient interpretive frames for what is going on (Goffman, 1974). Thus what counts as text and context or sign and environment are studied situationally and interactionally. This analytic vantage point does not, however, preclude attention to the formal aspects of texts; rather it treats form from a more dialogic perspective, as interactionally emergent. As Bauman and Briggs (1990) observe: ‘In order to avoid reifying “the context” it is necessary to study the textual details that illuminate the manner in which participants are collectively constructing the world around them’ (p. 69). Several further terms have been developed to describe these processes in terms of the text/context distinction in interaction. Narrators often use phrases such as ‘Did I tell you what happened the other day?’ to foreground a stretch of interaction as text distinct from surrounding talk and distinct from the environment more generally. Decontextualization, then, is a crystallizing or reducing process in which some given instance of semiotic activity is detached from its ‘local context’ (Urban, 1996, p. 21), a process entailing entextualization. Recontextualization, then, involves reworking, recycling, refashioning bits of decontextualized text in new, often inventive, ways. Bauman and Briggs (1990) articulate why performance is a useful analytic for studying these processes of entextualization and contextualization: Performance . . . provides a frame that invites critical reflection on communicative processes. A given performance is tied to a number of speech events that precede and succeed it (as performances, readings of texts, negotiations, rehearsals, gossip, reports, critiques, challenges, subsequent performances, and the like). (pp. 60–1)


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A process-oriented way of understanding communicative practices makes the entextualization and contextualization processes of narrating – which, in this case, happen in a narrative spell – a compelling analytic frame for studying classroom discussion as a remediation practice. Analyses of narrative performances (including the poetics of such performances) then become not exclusively formal textual analyses, but


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rather the study of entextualization moves made by individuals that, if successful, may spur further recontextualization. These contextualization and entextualization processes are a type of what Prior and Hengst (this volume) would call serial remediation. In the following analysis of a narrative spell, the term identifying narrative performance refers to entextualizations and recontextualizations in which persons perform narratives as part of a chain of interaction (a narrative spell), and so take moral stances in response to (an)other(s). The moral stance-taking of identifying narrative performances involve narrators in identifying work. In narrative practices, one interactional move which narrators often use as resource for moral stance-taking is what I call, following Tannen (1989), constructed dialogue. Constructed dialogue – typically labeled reported speech (Jakobson, 1971b; Voloshinov, 1973) or animation (Goffman, 1981) in the literature – can be said to occur when persons purport to quote what someone else has said, verbatim. However, the term ‘constructed dialogue’ – as opposed to the range of other possible terms – points out how persons use this move interactionally to perform identity: usually persons do constructed dialogue, often within narrative, to position themselves in particular ways and often the bit of language entextualized as the ‘exact words’ of another is invented by participants in the here-and-now to do this interactional identifying work.

Method The nature of my data allows me to be indicative, rather than to press the theoretical approach outlined above as far as it might go for analyzing narrative spells and for exploring classroom discussions as semiotic processes. In what follows, I outline some general features of the data I worked with, the ‘context’ and process of generating it, and its limitations for analysis of the narrative spell. This analysis comes from a study initially designed as a sociolinguistic narrative case study embedded within a larger-scale experimental study that cut across many classrooms. I videotaped ten class periods during the entirety of an instructional unit in February/March 2003 in which a linguistically and culturally diverse seventh-grade language arts classroom was studying Virginia E. Wolff’s young adult fictional work, Make Lemonade. The book tells the tale of a young teen, LaVaughn, who finds an after-school job babysitting for Jilly and Jeremy, the two children of a teen mother named Jolly who is struggling to rear and support the


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children on her own. In addition to generating the videotapes, I also generated CLASS files during each class period I observed. CLASS is a laptop computer program for tracking English classroom activities and the program specializes in detailed coding of questions. Those CLASS data are irrelevant to the present analysis (although they are crucial to a previous analysis conducted with colleagues [Juzwik et al., 2008], on which the current analysis builds); however, my generation of them accounts for some of the limitations to my data set. I came to know Susan Gomez, the focal teacher in this study, because she was participating in a large-scale, two-year Partnership for Literacy (PFL) study being conducted by the Center on English Learning and Achievement (CELA), where I was employed from 2001 to 2003 to go into classrooms and generate data as a research assistant. The PFL project engaged teachers in professional development (PD) work focused on improving dialogic instruction (among other things). I had already noticed, however, that Ms. Gomez seemed to have a knack for leading discussions in the first year of the study, when she was participating as a member of the control group (she did not participate in PD that year). Reinforcing this observation, she wrote in a paper for a class she was taking at the time that Oprah’s book club offered a model for the type of discussion she aspired to orchestrate in her classes. The focal narrative spell occurred in day 5 of the ten-day Make Lemonade unit in one of Ms. Gomez’s seventh-grade English language arts classes. Juzwik et al. (2008) offer a more detailed description of Ms. Gomez and the student participants in the focal classroom (pp. 1118–20). As homeroom teacher for the class, Ms. Gomez read announcements to her students daily at the beginning of each class period, collected money for various activities, and urged students to get involved in school- and language arts class-related activities (such as going to see Romeo and Juliet or joining the yearbook staff). In this way, Ms. Gomez had an ongoing relationship with this class and at times did a fair amount of mothering, as part of her institutional role of providing a ‘home’ room at school. Three focal participants (Ms. Gomez, Alice, and Lenina) engaged in the segment of narrative spell analyzed here, although all the students helped to construct its enactment as audience members (through, for example, laughter). Ms. Gomez and Lenina both identified themselves as Mexican American persons, while Alice identified as Caucasian.3 Generating the unit-level data was part of, but also an extension of, the broader CELA data generation effort of which I was part (for example, in few other partnership classrooms was a full unit of instruction


84


Figure 4.1

85

Map of classroom

documented and analyzed). To generate the video and CLASS data, I set up one video camera (see Figure 4.1 for location), trying to capture as many consenting participants in the classroom as possible. Nonparticipants were off-camera. Following the project protocol, used also by many other research assistants in many other classrooms, I let the video camera run while I generated the activity and discourse coding in CLASS. This explains why one participant in the focal narrative spell, Lenina (a consenting participant) is off-camera, left of the dotted line in Figure 4.1. Throughout the process of working with these classroom data (spanning the years since their generation in 2003), transcription has been conceived as an ongoing theoretical and cultural process, following the natural history approach outlined in Silverstein and Urban (1996). Narrative discourse was initially transcribed in stanzas and lines, as shown in Juzwik and Sherry (2007), following my previous work on narrative (see, for example, Juzwik, 2004, 2006, in press). However, for the present analysis, I used a version of poetic narrative transcription using lines and stanzas (for more detail, see Gee, 1991; Juzwik, 2004), but included also a second column to show gestures enacted in narrative performances inspired by Ochs’ (1979) early work on the ‘rhetoric of transcription’ (to borrow Mishler’s [1991] later language) in social science research. This shift allowed me to consider the enactment of the narrative spell more fully and to consider how gesture, as well as discourse, operated as part


Mary M. Juzwik



of the contextualization processes of the spell. I use line conventions, following previous work, although there do seem to be limitations of this convention for semiotic analysis. The further limitations of these data for the present analysis are many. The primary data are video, and although I recorded them and observed class periods in which videotapes were generated, the camera angle was partial, and my memory even more so. Because of the physical layout by which participants were arranged in the classroom, many gestures and other semiotic dimensions of the interactions were obscured. There were other data I did not generate, but retrospectively wish that I had, for purposes of semiotic analysis: detailed field notes, student writing prior to discussion (designed to serve as a ’springboard’ for discussion), teacher lesson plans, material on walls, and full videotaped views of all participants (which would have required a second camera and perhaps another research colleague). For these reasons, the focus of my data is primarily textual and linguistic, but to the extent that I can, I do try here to also attend to the semiotics of place and body at work in the narrative spell.

Entextualization and contextualization processes in a narrative spell Placing a narrative spell The physical arrangement of bodies in the interactional episode studied here was routine for this unit and for other units I observed in Ms. Gomez’s classroom during the two-year study (see Figure 4.1). At the beginning of each class, Ms. Gomez and students rearranged themselves in a circle in school desks (chairs with flat boards attached) facing toward the middle of the room. The map indicates the arrangement visible on the video: nine students are visible, two are partially cut off by the camera, three (including Alice) sit with their backs to the camera, and one student (S2 in Figure 4.1) sometimes obscures Ms. Gomez’s front, including her hands. The four chairs in the middle of the circle index the de facto nondiscussion physical arrangement of rows facing the front of the classroom (located on the right side of the map). The physical shift to a circular classroom arrangement signaled a shift in participation expectations. Instead of working in solitude (for example, on writing) or listening to or interacting with the teacher alone, everyone was welcome to participate in literary discussions and students were expected to look at and interact with one another, not just


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with Ms. Gomez. Although Ms. Gomez had arranged her class in circles before participating in PFL, this physical arrangement also functioned as a norm within the PD forums of that project (see Adler and Rougle, 2005, for more detail). Ms. Gomez reinforced the egalitarian footing of this arrangement in the metalinguistic comment in her first narrative, analyzed below: ‘I was explaining this to someone the other day.’ Like the arrangement of the room, this almost conspiratorial meta-talk signaled that, as with friends or family (whom I presume this ‘someone’ to be), students and Ms. Gomez could confide in one another and sort complex moral issues out together, through discussion. Negotiating identification through entextualization and contextualization processes in a narrative spell In this narrative spell, which I have titled ‘Speaking Up’ because of its theme, three narratives contiguously followed the initial teacher narrative. After the fourth narrative, six turns of talk (85 seconds) occurred before the fifth narrative and another 12 conversational turns (38 seconds) unfolded before the sixth and final narrative; thus while the first four narratives were contiguous to one another, the final three were not. The entire narrative spell lasted 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Because of space constraints, I focus here on the first four (contiguous) narratives within the longer spell (2 minutes and 40 seconds of the spell). Narrative decontextualization and entextualization: Ms. Gomez launches a narrative spell To launch the narrative spell, Susan Gomez enacted the first, and longest, narrative in the narrative spell, shown in Figure 4.2 (see Appendix for transcription conventions). This narrative performance, lasting 106 seconds, emerged through a decontextualization process common in classroom literary discussions: teachers (and occasionally students) distilling literature into a theme which is then recontextualized in subsequent discussion. In the case of this narrative, Ms. Gomez extracted and rendered an excerpt of Make Lemonade detachable as a text:


Mary M. Juzwik

people are going to try to take advantage of you someTIMES in a physical way (lines 3–4) [people] . . . are going to try to take advantage of me (lines 48–9)


Gesture

Ms. Gomez (narrative 1)

Note: During this narrative, with the exception of student 6, all 8 students in view of camera are gazing at teacher with at least one elbow on their desk.

1. [WELL, It’s] unfortunate, you know. 2. As you get older too, there are probably going to be things that come up 3. where people are going to try to take advantage of you 4. someTIMES in a physical way. 5. And will you be prepared for it? 6. ∗ You know, I, my experience∗ is dif-, has been different growing up because I’m ∗∗ Mexican∗∗ . 7. And I SEE the world through Mexican eyes. 8. I was taught, you know, that not ∗∗∗ everybody LIKES Mexican kids.∗∗∗ 9. And so I grew up being on guard around adults, around people 10. I have to WATCH OUT for that 11. Because if I let my guard down, and I’ve done that, 12. where I didn’t think about it, I wasn’t paying any attention, 13. and somebody treated me unfairly. 14. And it, then, really makes me, freaks me OUT 15. And it makes me uncomfortable, when somebody’s being prejudiced or something?∗ 16. And I don’t ∗ like not being ready for it. 17. I’d RATHER,∗ 18. ∗∗ I was explaining this to someone the other da:y,∗∗

∗

Turns left, removes sweater from back of chair with left hand, places in lap∗

∗∗

moves forward slightly∗∗ Lifts sweater/jacket from lap to nose level, then quickly brings down to lap∗∗∗ ∗∗∗

∗

Folds hands together in front of face, fingers folded

∗

Unfolds hands and rhythmically shakes them, with each word∗



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33. I spoke up, and I said, 34. ‘Excuse me, 35. Am I INVISIBLE?’ 36. [And shAlice: [You SAID that? 37. ∗ Yes, to the CLERK∗

∗∗

Slowly unfolds hands and places them down so they are obscured∗∗

∗

Elbow on desk, pumps right hand in fist with thumb extended∗ ∗ Dons sweater/jacket∗ ∗∗ extends left arm, moves arm and waves left hand in leftward direction∗∗ ∗∗∗ left arm still extended, moves arm and waves hand in rightward direction∗∗∗ ∗ pulls down emphatically on each sides of sweater/jacket with both hands∗ ∗∗ leans forward∗∗

Note: During lines 1–35, I infer that Alice is doing some kind of writing and possibly erasing from the motion of her arms and shoulder. ∗ gazes at Alice∗

Figure 4.2 Transcript of Ms. Gomez’s first narrative in spell 89



19. I’d rather go into a situation EXPECTING to be treated unfairly than go into a situation no-, not expecting, thinking, 20. ‘Oh yeah, these are nice people, 21. Well, they’re going to be nice to me.’ 22. They’re going to be nice to me.’ 23. Because, when I’m not, when I don’t have my guard up, 24. I’m not prepared to ∗ answer back to somebody.∗ 25. You know what I mean? what I’m saying? 26. ∗ Like, let me give you an example. 27. I was in the store the other day. 28. And the CLERK was ignoring me.∗ 29. She was ∗∗ waiting on a person over here∗∗ 30. ∗∗∗ And then she went to wait on a person over here∗∗∗ 31. ∗ And after she did this TWICE,∗ 32. ∗∗ And I had been there FIRST,∗∗

Gesture

38. And she looked at me. 39. She said, 40. ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ 41. She said, I said, 42. ‘I was WAITing, 43. I was here FIRST.’ 44. And SHE WASN’T GOING to ∗ acknowledge me∗ 45. Until ∗∗ I spoke UP.∗∗ 46. ∗ And it made me, and it reminded me AGAIN 47. that there are people OUT there 48. That are going to try to take advantage of me, and [be MEAN to me, Being disrespectful to me.∗ Alice: [(That’s like what happened to us too)] Ms. Gomez: ∗ Pardon?∗ Figure 4.2

∗

puts right hand out flat, palm up, moves rhythmically∗ moves hand up to chin∗∗ ∗ hand gestures obscured∗ ∗∗

∗

leaning forward, gazing at Alice∗

(Continued)



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In these lines which framed the performance rather like bookends, Ms. Gomez decontextualized a literary passage that unfolded on pages 56 through 59 of Make Lemonade. In this passage, the character Jolly angrily recounts being sexually assaulted by her boss, who she fends off, resulting in the loss of her job. On Ms. Gomez’s rendering, the boss ‘took advantage of her’ because she was a woman. In line 3, this crystallized bit of literary discourse seems to work as motivation for Ms. Gomez’s own tale of someone trying ’to take advantage’ of her because she is Mexican. The phrase, ‘someTIMES in a physical way’ contextualized the moral problem of being taken advantage of as sexual or other physical assault and projected this problem into students’ hypothetical futures. In this manner, she linked this new entextualization with the literary action/problem of sexual or other physical assault. At the same time, the self-identification as ‘Mexican’ indicated a new direction for the theme: that Ms. Gomez faces the ongoing challenge of racist exclusion, rather than sexual assault or other physical harm. After a lengthy orientation (lines 6–25), this narrative event became an identifying performance in lines 27 through 43 as Ms. Gomez shifted from recounting to enacting people trying to take advantage of her. At line 26, Ms. Gomez finally donned the sweater/jacket she had been holding since early on (line 6) in the narrative event. Her putting on of the sweater/jacket – the most physically dramatic gesture in the performance – worked as a cue drawing attention to her person. From this point onward, Ms. Gomez entextualized a clerk (rather than a lecherous boss, as in the book) trying to take advantage of her person. This move drew attention to Ms. Gomez and she stayed at center stage in the subsequent enactment of what a good and proper person should do when someone is trying to take advantage of her. The setting of the scene – in a store (line 27) – located Ms. Gomez’s enactment in a recognizable social situation with particular protocols for appropriate behaviors. For example, if a person arrives at a store first, a clerk should wait on her first. I interpret this scene as a lunch counter because of the use of the verb ‘wait,’ as in the ‘clerk’ is waiting on other customers. Although other interpretations are possible, this interpretation was made relevant by Alice’s recontextualization of Ms. Gomez’s narrative (discussed below): it occurred in a ‘store’ where ice cream and lunch are served at a counter where a clerk takes your order. In relatively recent US history, moreover, such stores were important and visible sites of civil rights protest about racial discrimination (the reason Ms. Gomez believed the clerk was trying to take advantage of her) – for example, the


Mary M. Juzwik



sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters during the Civil Rights Movement (Branch, 1988, pp. 271–5). The offense Ms. Gomez performed experiencing at this lunch counter was dramatically marked, both by gesture and by a more poetically dense narrative talk (relative to the preceding orientation section). She used her body to perform the offensive act: a parallelism of gesture in which she waved her left hand leftward, and then rightward in the same manner to index the clerk’s attention on others – everywhere but on her, where attention should have been paid (lines 29–30). Aside from the donning of the sweater/jacket, this parallel hand-waving constituted the most dramatic gestures of the narrative performance. Lexical repetition worked alongside the physically enacted parallelism: ‘person’ was repeated in each of the lines, seeming to imply that by ignoring Ms. Gomez, this clerk was treating her as a nonperson. Ms. Gomez also made the ends of successive clauses in these two lines parallel, through the antithetical ‘here’ and ‘here’ – indexicals referring (as her hands indicated) to two different locations in the store. The performance of affront continued in lines 31–2 as the parallelism of successive clauses again accompanied emphatic gesturing. In line 31, Ms. Gomez drew attention once again to her person by using her two hands to pull down on each side of her sweater jacket, a physical enactment of the word ‘twice’. Observe the vivid contrast between ‘TWICE’ (line 31) and ‘FIRST’ (line 32) – both of which Ms. Gomez emphasized by increased volume relative to other words in the clause, the contrasting pronouns ‘she’ and ‘I,’ and the alliterative pronouns ‘this’ and ‘there’ occupying the same structural location within the clause. This verbal parallelism worked together with Ms. Gomez’s physical movement to revivify the offense; other verbal cohesion devices (such as amplification and substitution, which I will not detail here) similarly contributed to the poetically dense identifying performance of lines 26–43. With the scene set and a violation of the moral order so established, Ms. Gomez leaned forward toward students, obscuring the front of her body from the camera (line 32). She proceeded to entextualize a constructed dialogue as the ‘maximally reportable act’ (Bauman, 1986, p. 54), the climactic punch line of the identifying narrative performance. Ms. Gomez performed ‘speaking up’ to the clerk. To emphasize this move, she repeated this action in the quotative framing: ‘I spoke up, and I said’ (line 33). Here and in line 41, Ms. Gomez used conspicuously neutral verbs of saying – all variations of the verb ‘to say.’ This neutrality makes sense given that the other option – perhaps, as


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we will see, what Alice might have been expecting – was silent acquiescence. I interpret the very act of speaking – as opposed to being silent – being performed as reportable and morally correct. Ms. Gomez performed the speech event, in which she commenced to confront and right this offense to her personhood, in lines 33–4: ‘Excuse me, am I INVISIBLE?’ The rhetorical force of this confrontational entextualization became evident in Alice’s response interjected in the narrative event, which paralleled the clerk’s response in the narrated event. As constructed dialogue, it may well be the case that Ms. Gomez and the clerk did not utter these words at all; however, this referential element is less important here than the affordance of this dialogue for Ms. Gomez’s performance of moral stance. In the narrative event, Alice looked up at Ms. Gomez and whatever task she had been doing earlier in the narrative (I speculate, from her shoulder movement, writing and erasing). Her responsive question, ‘You SAID that?’ together with the shift in her activity, conveyed surprise and possibly even shock. I interpret this as an acknowledgement of the rhetorical force of the utterance, which Alice did not seem to endorse. Within the narrated event, Ms. Gomez’s performed speaking up led to resolution in lines 38–43. The clerk apologized and Ms. Gomez, unrelenting, reasserted her right to be waited on: ‘I was WAITing/I was here FIRST’ (lines 42–3). The clerk’s response to Ms. Gomez acknowledged a violation of the moral order along with a warranted apology for that violation. In response to Alice in the narrative event, Ms. Gomez did not back down or acknowledge that this could be considered strong confrontational language for the Midwestern US. Rather, she indicated relish in her speech act, adding to her ‘yes’ the adverbial phrase ‘to the clerk’ (I could not see any accompanying gestures). The utterance of this phrase was not necessary to make her meaning clear: the scene-setting established that Ms. Gomez spoke up to the clerk, rather than to someone else. However, this response affirmed the properness of her speech act even while it permitted her to dwell a little longer on it with some enjoyment. Similarly, in the narrated event, Ms. Gomez stood her ground with conviction: ‘I was WAITing/I was here FIRST’ (lines 42–3), recounting her grievance through emphasis on the words ‘WAIT’ and ‘FIRST.’ Here the verb ‘waiting’ in Ms. Gomez’s response stylistically (using the trope, antanaclasis) tied the constructed dialogue back to the scene-setting (lines 29–30) in which the clerk was waiting on the two other persons, but not on her. She did not say, for example, ‘That’s okay’; instead, she seemed to savor the conversational moment


Mary M. Juzwik



in which she chastised the clerk in an almost teacherly correction of the social violation. With this response, Ms. Gomez placed herself on equal footing with the other persons, including the clerk in the store: like the clerk ‘waiting,’ she too was ‘waiting.’ And so Ms. Gomez’s courageous everyday speech act, and the surrounding dialogue that recognized it and supported its rhetorical force (both in the narrated event and in the narrative event) enacted a successful effort to restore the moral order violated in the store. Customers who are there first should be waited on first, rather than waiting to be waited on, and Mexican customers should not be rendered invisible. Thus, through performance of the constructed dialogue, and the offense leading up to it, Ms. Gomez enacted success in achieving recognition as a person facing an antagonist actively trying not to acknowledge her as a person. Ms. Gomez presented herself to her students as an active agent who – through everyday acts of ‘speaking up’ – does influence the actions of others. As already discussed, Ms. Gomez highlighted this identity work by the dramatic actions of donning of her sweater/jacket and tugging on its front as she recounted the clerk’s offense, but she also managed this through the emphatic repetition of ‘I spoke up, and I said’ (line 33), by the echo of ‘I spoke up’ in line 45 (‘until I spoke up’), and by the repetition of self-referring pronouns in the person-producing speech: ‘me’ (see, for example, line 28) and ‘I’ (as in lines 35 and 41–3). Ms. Gomez further enacted this identification by her ascription of intentionality to the clerk’s behavior. She used a verbal construction of ‘she WASN’T GOING TO acknowledge me’ (line 44) – emphasizing ‘wasn’t going to’ by her increased volume – rather than a more descriptive ‘she did not acknowledge me.’ The emphasized verbal phrase (‘wasn’t going to’) implied that the clerk intentionally planned not to acknowledge her. Thus Ms. Gomez portrayed this clerk as belonging on the societal landscape described in the orientation (lines 6–25), as someone who is prejudiced and malevolently chooses not to recognize Mexicans as persons. Through this antagonistic construction, then, Ms. Gomez became morally obliged to demand acknowledgement of her personhood. In so doing, Susan Gomez ‘verbally snatch[ed] a . . . victory from the jaws of defeat by rescuing face in a situation in which it appeared that [she] had lost it’ (Bauman, 1986, p. 71). Similar sorts of identifying occurred not just in this narrative spell, but also across timescales of classroom life (for example, in other identifying narrative performances, told at other times throughout the unit, semester, and school year) and across Ms. Gomez’s life span. I do not, however, have space here to extend the present analysis into these other timescales.


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95

Alice further responded to Ms. Gomez by enacting a scene at a lunch counter, shown in Figure 4.3. In this narrative (lasting 33 seconds) Alice performed a ‘rich Dutch woman’ using the same words uttered by Ms. Gomez, ‘EXCUSE ME/I was FIRST’ (lines 19–20), to take advantage of her – as a ‘kid’ – rather than being used, like Ms. Gomez, to speak up on her own behalf in the face of others taking advantage of her. Alice performed this other woman using the very same words that achieved recognition of Ms. Gomez’s previously ignored personhood to ignore Alice’s person. Alice interpreted this slight to have occurred because she was ‘just a kid.’ Thus Alice recontextualized Ms. Gomez’s ‘speaking up’ entextualization within a parallel context to carry a new illocutionary function. In Alice’s narrative response, she too shifted from recounting to performing identity and like Ms. Gomez, used her body – most visibly (to me) her right hand – as a significant resource for that performance of being a good and proper person. Just as Ms. Gomez’s most emphatic gesture (waving her left hand) accompanied her performance of the clerk’s offense, so Alice’s most emphatic gesture – lifting her right arm and waving her right hand with fingers spread, as if indicating ‘stop’ – worked to enact her being taken advantage of by an adult. This gesturing occurred simultaneous to the recontextualized utterance: ‘EXCUSE ME/I was FIRST.’ This offending speech act was, like Ms. Gomez’s entextualization of constructed dialogue, the maximally reportable event of the narrative. What was reportable in Alice’s narrative, however, was not the act of speaking up for oneself, but the possibility that so doing could in fact result in taking advantage of someone, such as a kid, whom ‘people at stores’ tend to ignore (line 25). Alice, like Ms. Gomez, performed herself as a person being treated unfairly in a store situation. Unlike Ms. Gomez’s identifying performance, however, Alice did not present ethnicity as the reason for her unfair treatment; rather, being ‘just a kid’ was the reason, while an ethnically marked ‘other’ (Dutch) person perpetrated the injustice. Being a kid, rather than being culturally ‘other,’ became the identification eliciting a person taking advantage of her in a store interaction with a clerk. Alice’s identifying performance offered a disagreement-throughcontrast with Ms. Gomez’s entextualized speaking up in the store. First, as already discussed, Alice registered surprise at what Ms. Gomez performed herself saying to the clerk. Her interjection in Ms. Gomez’s narrative (‘You SAID that?’) along with the accompanying change in Alice’s body language, seemed to imply ‘I can’t believe you said that!’


Narrative recontextualization 1: Alice


Alice: [(That’s like what happened to us too)] Ms. Gomez: ∗ Pardon?∗

∗ leaning forward, gazing at Alice∗ ((Alice has back to camera, left elbow on desk, right elbow down, head turned rightward toward Ms. Gomez.))

Alice (narrative 2): 1. My dad, we were THERE ∗ in the store. 2. It was in the same part as∗ this ∗∗ one rich Dutch woman.∗∗ 3. She was ordering lunch. 4. And ∗ we were there, I was there, before, 5. while my family as coming off the boat

∗

gestures faintly rightward with right hand, moving fingers ((right elbow stays down))∗

∗∗ ∗

faintly shakes head back and forth, head facing forward∗∗ slight right hand movement, pen in hand, mostly obscured from my view ∗

Ms. Gomez: Mhm 6. that we just got off of, 7. And I, I was waiting, 8. And I was going to order some ice cream or something. Ms. Gomez: Mhm 9. And they, they all come in. 10. I’m just like, 11. ‘Okay, 12. We, we can order now.’ 13. And I say 14. ∗ ‘Okay’ 15. You know,∗ 16. She said, she was already asking me, 17. If I was ready.

∗

lifts right hand up and slightly waves, fingers together, elbow remains down∗



Gesture

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Talk

∗

18. And then the lady says, 19. ∗ ’EXCUSE ME,∗ 20. ∗∗ I was FIRST!∗∗

∗

nodding head∗

dramatically lifts hand, arm, and elbow up, fingers spread out ((as if signaling ‘stop’))∗ ∗∗ lowers hand/arm/elbow slightly, fingers together with cupped hand∗∗

21. ‘Cause I was just a kid, 22. You know. Ms. Gomez: ∗ Yeah∗

∗

nodding head∗

23. I hate it when people do that, 24. [Like, Ms. Gomez: [Right

Note: Ms. Gomez gazes at Alice for the duration of this narrative, much of the time nodding her head while Alice speaks.

25. Especially people at stores. 26. They’re [just like, aw, you’re just kids Figure 4.3 Transcript of Alice’s narrative, the second in the spell

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Ms. Gomez: ∗ Mhm∗


Further, Alice responded to the story with a second story enacting an adult putting her down by saying the very thing Ms. Gomez performed herself saying in the store. That Alice made the ‘culturally other’ person victimizing her in the store parallel to Ms. Gomez through recontextualized dialogue and gesture could also be interpreted as a threat to Ms. Gomez’s face, albeit a subtle one. Alice’s formation of moral stance against that of Ms. Gomez further solidified later on in the narrative spell – in a further recontextualization of this constructed dialogue. In the fourth utterance after the fourth narrative – in which Lenina aligned her own identifying performance with Ms. Gomez’s, as we shall see below – Alice responded: ‘But then, what if it [speaking up] leads to something unnecessary? Like if you didn’t, like she said, like she was first, you know? And I’d say, um, no, I was first.’ She was suggesting that sometimes it might be better not to speak up, in contexts such as stores and facing people such as hostile (or merely clueless) clerks and customers, so you do not ‘start things’ with people, a situation with potential to devolve into one person’s word against another (a scenario which kids rarely win).

Narrative recontextualization 2: Ms. Gomez Ms. Gomez skillfully managed this implicit challenge to the correctness of her act of speaking up. In a 14-second response, she affirmed the relevance and the point of Alice’s narrative and she also elaborated an identifying performance within a newly proposed scenario, shown in Figure 4.4. This irrealis narrative response did not refer to events that really did happen, but that might or could happen in the future or might have happened in the past (Juzwik, 2006; Ochs and Capps, 2001). Through her hypothetical response to Alice, Ms. Gomez asserted that, if she were in the kind of situation Alice enacted, she would most certainly speak up for the ‘little kid’ who was waiting. She began her response and recontextualization with an affirmative ‘yes,’ which was a near-repetition of her interjected ‘yeah’ in Alice’s narrative and also an extension of her frequent nodding and interjected ‘mmhms’ during Alice’s narrative. She paired that ‘yes’ with the word ‘clerks’ (line 1), a referring noun introduced in her first narrative that was further elaborated in Alice’s narrative. As transition into her own narrative, those two words, in combination with line 2, are meta-talk suggesting that Ms. Gomez enacted the previous narrative in hopes of getting students to share their own stories: ‘That’s what I was hoping/Some of you were going to share’ (line 2). She so communicated that Alice fulfilled


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Gesture

Alice: They’re [just like, aw, you’re just kids Ms. Gomez (narrative 3) 1. [YES, clerks. 2. Well that’s what I was hoping some of you were going to share. 3. Examples like at the STORES. 4. I know clerks can do that, 5. They’ll ignore little kids. 6. I would be ∗ next to a little kid,∗ 7. ∗∗ And a clerk would come and ask ME∗∗ for something 8. ∗∗∗ And I would say,∗∗∗ 9. ∗ ‘Well, this person∗ was here first,’∗ 10. And ∗∗ got their MONEY out∗∗ 11. And ∗∗∗ READY h- ((laughter in voice)) to order.∗∗∗ 12. I mean, 13. Just because they’re SHORT Students: ((laughter)) 14. Doesn’t mean they should be taken adVANTage of.

∗

left arm out and pointing downward, hand slightly cupped, palm up∗ sweeps arm rightward, in circular motion ending with pointing to self∗∗ ∗∗∗ repeats: left arm out, pointing downward, hand slightly cupped, palm up∗∗∗ ∗∗

∗

same position as lines 6 and 8: shakes left hand, as if pointing emphatically∗ hand/arm up, holds cupped hand up, palms up, shaking (as if change)∗∗ ∗∗∗ repeats: hand/arm up, holds cupped hand up, palms up ∗∗

Figure 4.4 Transcript of Ms. Gomez’s second narrative, the third in the spell

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her expectation by sharing with the class a related (to her narrative) scenario involving clerks. In simultaneously summarizing and evaluating Alice’s narrative, ‘I know clerks can do that/They’ll ignore little kids’ (lines 4–5), Ms. Gomez articulated the moral stance that she took from Alice’s narrative and shifting the wrongdoing to clerks, rather than to pushy women customers. Alice, incidentally, seemed to contest this interpretation in her later comment about ‘starting something unnecessary.’ I wonder, too, if Alice objected to the recontextualized scenario, which could be likening her – Alice – to a ‘little kid’ in the new narrative situation: the seventh graders I know do not enjoy being likened to little kids. Alice may also have taken issue with the shift in focus to the clerk’s behavior, rather than inappropriate adult customer behavior. After these introductory moves (lines 1–5), Ms. Gomez once again shifted into an identifying performance in lines 6–11. She marked this shift, as in her first narrative, by gesturing and by herself enacting speaking up in a new situation: a hypothetical scenario recontextualizing Alice’s narrative scene where a clerk was ignoring a little kid and asking her for something instead (presumably, ‘May I help you?’). In this physical enactment, Ms. Gomez shifted between performing being a little kid at the store (lines 6–7, 9–11) and being the clerk wrongly speaking to her instead (line 8). As she placed herself ‘next to a little kid’ (line 6) in her talk, she simultaneously enacted a ‘little kid’ by holding her hand downward as if measuring height (physically indicating, as she verbalized later, in line 13, that the little kid is SHORT). She repeated this gesture twice, in lines 8 and 9, as she recontextualized the dialogue of the previous two narratives. With this new speech act, she performed herself righting another moral wrong: ‘Well, this person was here first.’ This time the moral wrong was taking advantage of little kids, rather than racial prejudice. Her use of the word ‘person’ furthered her contrast between the noun ‘persons’ used in the first narrative and the nonpersonhood associated with the adjective ‘invisible’ (Figure 4.2, line 35), the verb ‘ignoring’ (Figure 4.2, line 28) and the whole scenario of ‘being taken advantage of’ by a clerk. Unlike the ‘rich Dutch woman’ in Alice’s narrative, Ms. Gomez performed herself speaking up for the little kid, rather than treating the little kid as a nonperson. In lines 10 and 11, she went on to dramatize the pathos of the ‘little kid’ waiting in the store (perhaps a remediation of her own verbal representation of waiting in the store in the first narrative) by moving her hand and arm upward, holding her cupped hand up, palms out, and shaking – as if she were a little kid shaking change (perhaps a lot of


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money to little kids). In these six lines, too, the embodiment seemed almost to lead the verbalization – and I suspect it was the embodied drama along with the spoken, ‘I mean/just because they’re SHORT’ (lines 12–13), that elicited the laughter from her students after line 13. It might also have been her own laughter, just perceptible in line 13. She threaded the hypothetical narrative back to her initial decontextualization of the literary theme, ‘people taking advantage of you/me’ by comically noting that just because kids are short ‘doesn’t mean they should be taken adVANtage of’ (line 14). Thus, again, Ms. Gomez performed herself taking a moral stance against injustice through constructed dialogue. This time, she transformed herself into the defender of small children: the rightness of her actions, rather than being defended, was extended to a new performed scenario. Ms. Gomez so recontextualized Alice’s phrase ‘just a kid’ (narrative 2, line 21) to ‘a little kid’ and she enacted this hypothetical little kid character by gesture (lines 6–7, 8–11) and by description (lines 10–11).

Recontextualization 3: Lenina This narrative presumably set up the hypothetical scenario for Lenina’s seven-second narrative: ‘I would speak up. I’d be like, ‘Excuse me, I was here first. I want to order’ (the fourth narrative).4 This hypothetical narrative dialogued with Ms. Gomez’s narrative response to Alice, Ms. Gomez’s initial narrative entextualization, and Alice’s response. Lenina seemed to insert herself as a ‘kid’ into the hypothetical situation proposed by Ms. Gomez and, like Alice, she repeated the punch line from Ms. Gomez’s narrative. Unlike Alice, however, Lenina used the recontextualized dialogue to align with the sense in which it was used by Ms. Gomez: to speak up and verbally correct the wrongdoing of the clerk, rather than to ignore the personhood of another customer (as in Alice’s narrative). She also added on ‘I want to order,’ with the verb ‘order’ recontextualizing Ms. Gomez’s performance (Figure 4.2) of a little kid ‘READY to order’ (line 11, italics added) and Alice (Figure 4.3) as the ‘kid’ who was ‘going to order some ice cream or something’ (line 8, italics added) and then speaking for her family: ‘we can order now’ (line 12, italics added). She so situated her narrative in the same type of lunch counter scenario presented by Ms. Gomez and Alice, building conversational coherence with the previous two narratives, while linking back to Ms. Gomez’s narrative through the recontextualized constructed dialogue. In this narrative, then, Lenina enacted being Ms. Gomez, doing


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what Ms. Gomez would do, and in so doing, appeared to affirm the moral correctness of Ms. Gomez’s actions. It seems plausible that this is an instance of a type of moral modeling, but it occurs at a relatively short timescale in the classroom life – at the level of interaction over several minutes – and is not usually what comes to mind in historical or contemporary conversations about teachers as moral models (for example, historically, female teachers being restricted from certain types of activities, such as dating men) and teaching as moral modeling.

Conclusion In this analysis, I have explored how one English teacher and her seventh-grade students negotiated moral stance within a narrative spell, a process of serial remediation that emerged within the practice of literary discussion. By focusing on semiotics of place, embodied gesture, and constructed dialogue, this analysis tracked how, in a narrative spell, individuals entextualized and recontextualized literary discourse and the identifying narrative performances of others to do identification work. Ms. Gomez did seem to want to make a more didactic point about being prepared for a big scary world out there where people will take advantage of you. Yet this narrative spell engaged students and teachers in exploratory moral stance-taking on this theme, stance-taking that engaged participants in performing identity. In conclusion, I take up three issues emerging from this analysis: (a) the implications for studying classroom discussion from a semiotic perspective, especially a shift from analyzing narrative to narrative spell, (b) the usefulness of tracing the moral dimensions of ‘doing English’ in contemporary classrooms at the level of narrative interaction, and (c) the possibilities of studying narratives as boundary objects in cross-timescale analysis. From narrative to narrative spell: semiotic analysis of classroom discussion This exploration of narrative spells, a unit of classroom interaction that has not – at least not to my knowledge – heretofore been subjected to close study, indicates some directions that semiotic analyses of literary discussions in classrooms might take. The effort to study teachers’ embodied pedagogical moves seems especially valuable at the middle school level for those interested in questions of what makes instruction engaging to students. I have informally observed,


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in video work with English teacher candidates, that middle school students seem more engaged in classrooms where teachers are highly animated. I suspect that more careful analytical attention to gesture in the context of discussion could lead to fruitful discoveries about student engagement. Many analyses of literary discussion in classrooms conceptualize ‘authentic’ or ‘open’ discussion as a discourse genre (for example, Hadjioannou, 2007; Marshall, Smagorinsky, and Smith, 1995); in contrast, this analysis has foregrounded how genres – identifying narrative performances – came into dialogue within discussion, in narrative spells. In the case of Ms. Gomez and her students, narrative performances became resources for literary discussion, and narrative spells formed a semiotic activity in which genre, gesture, and constructed dialogue were cast into dialogue. One further set of issues raised by the analysis involves how to bound narrative spells as interactional units for analysis: When does a narrative spell start? Should narratives within a narrative spell be contiguous? Does a narrative spell need to introduce an altogether new topic or theme, or can it recycle previous themes already introduced in the conversation? If narratives within a narrative spell are not contiguous, then at what point is the spell broken? I (and my colleagues who were involved in earlier analyses of these data) defined narrative spells as occurring when ‘a string of at least three stories was uttered by three or more interlocutors around a coherent topic or theme’ (Juzwik et al., 2008, p. 1142); however, this definition is somewhat ambiguous. For example, we decided that ‘a string’ of narratives did not have to be contiguous for a narrative spell to occur. In the analysis, however, the narrative spell could have been said to end after Lenina’s narrative, after which there occurred nonnarrative conversation before the next narrative in the ‘string’ of narratives that we defined to constitute the spell. Although my data were limited and I restricted my focus to embodied gesture, talk, and some dimensions of classroom space, it seems that this approach could go much further through, for example, more detailed explorations of trajectories in classroom space (see Leander and Sheehy, 2004), more detailed attention to simultaneous gesturing and embodied action of all participants, and more detailed accounts of narrative entextualization and contextualization processes (by, for example, tracing teacher lesson plans, prompts for writing, and student writing). In shifting analytic units from discourse to semiotics, researchers of classroom interaction need to develop new systems for translating and remediating the wide range of semiotic action that constitutes classroom


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discussion (including discourse, gesture, space, bodies), in order to map – or entextualize – its complexity for new types of semiotic analysis.

This analysis attempted to track the lingering moral mandate that English as a school subject concern itself with identity work. I showed how this mandate can play out interactionally in narrative spells that occur as part of literary discussions. In this case, the narrative spell unfolded in a seventh-grade English classroom, taught by a teacher who was skilled at leading discussions, guided by the model of Oprah’s book club, and facilitated by her affiliation with the CELA PFL project. This analysis of narrative spell suggests how teachers’ identifying narrative performances may be morally consequential, as they ‘imbue experience with moral direction’ (Ochs and Capps, 2001, p. 45). It seems that, for Lenina at least, Ms. Gomez’s performance was a compelling enough moral model for organizing the experience of a social violation that she projected herself emulating it. It may matter here that, like Ms. Gomez, Lenina also identified as Mexican and this affiliation, more than the narrative recontextualization process, may have compelled Lenina to this stance. Nonetheless, this analysis points out how narrative spells, and classroom literary discussions more generally, can be instances where teachers perform moral modeling, albeit (I speculate) much of the time unconsciously. While analyses of literary and other written texts are the more obvious focus for taking stock of the moral stances and identifications encouraged in English classrooms, narrative (or other) entextualization and recontextualization practices offer an alternative, fine-grained analytic for empirical study of the moral work of doing English.

Studying identifying narrative performances as boundary objects A final possibility raised by this analysis of a narrative spell is to consider how a researcher might articulate local narrative interactions beyond local remediation processes (such as narrative spells) into ecosocial processes at slower timescales (Lemke, 2000). In the present case, these slower timescales might include, for example, individual life stories, the history of literary response, even the history of schooled literacy. It seems that identifying narrative performances might usefully serve as boundary objects, defined by Star and Griesemer (1989) as


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objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual site use. These objects may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation. The creation and management of boundary objects is a key process in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds. (p. 393) While Star and Griesemer were interested in scientific objects (such as animal specimens) as boundary objects, I believe there may be analytic utility in conceptualizing symbolic forms, such as narrative performances, as boundary objects, especially for the purpose of tracing identification over time in classroom interaction. As boundary objects, narrative performances might be decontextualized from narrative spells and recontextualized as mediating individuals’ solidified roles (Georgakopoulou, 2008) developed through the sedimentation and lamination of stories an individual tells and stories told about her over time in classroom discussions (see also Sfard and Prusak, 2005; Wortham, 2006). The boundary object idea is particularly interesting for tracking how life stories are coherently (or not) stitched together over time. Such analysis might entail investigating, for example, how Ms. Gomez’s initial narrative performance became a part of a broader set of narrative performances across multiple class periods during the curricular unit and across the school year. In this data set, it would not be difficult to track repeated identifying performances that present Ms. Gomez as a person of color struggling at times to overcome challenges, but always prevailing over adversity.

Appendix: Transcription conventions ALL CAPS [ (?) (abc) (( )) ?

The utterance is louder or otherwise emphasized, in comparison to surrounding words Overlapping talk Unintelligible speech ‘Best guess’ transcription Additional information or description Rising intonation


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-∗ xxx∗

Self-interruption/repair Gesture(s) occurring within a segment of talk enclosed by one to three asterisks (∗,∗∗,∗∗∗ ), with the number of asterisks designed to clarify the alignment between lines of talk and the accompanying gestures

Notes 1. Brandt seems primarily interested in contrasting the moral mandate for literacy with the economic mandate for literacy that arose after the Second World War; however, I am interested in observing how that historical moral mandate lingers and lives on in middle and secondary English instruction. 2. Book 1 of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (2005) offers one novelistic account of the salons of prerevolutionary Russia, where French (rather than Russian) was spoken, where ‘talk for the sake of talk’ was cultivated, where persons went to be or to become socially visible in fine society. Tolstoy illustrates an interesting feature of the salons, also observed by Craveri (2005): they were run by women, who became gatekeepers and regulators of the art of conversation. 3. This identification occurred here, elsewhere in the classroom discussions, and/or on the student questionnaires generated as data for the large-scale research project. 4. I use a simplified transcription format here because the narrative is so short and because I did not have access to Lenina’s gestures for the analysis.


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Semiotic Remediation, Conversational Narratives and Aphasia Julie A. Hengst University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Stories touch us even before we enter the world and they continue until we go to the next world. They are in the dreams of an unborn baby, in the kindergarten in school, in news reports and movies, in novels, in conversations and nightmares. We tell each other stories all our waking hours, and when our mouths are silent, we are telling stories to ourselves in the secrecy of our minds. We can’t help but tell stories because they are a language in themselves. Rachana quoted in In Arabian Nights (Shah, 2008, p. 52) From published works and formal performances of gifted storytellers to mundane reporting of everyday events, narrative discourse is pervasive across cultural–linguistic groups, and the study of narrative has provided rich ground for exploring human cognitive, sociocultural, and communicative practices. Indeed, the sheer pervasiveness of narrative discourse supports, at least in part, Bruner’s (1986) contention that narrative is one of two fundamental ways that humans are wired to organize, and make sense of, experience. Focusing on marked cultural narratives, anthropologists (for example, Basso, 1996; Bauman, 1986) have typically documented the formal organization of narrative performances and analyzed the critical roles narratives can and do play in displaying and building cultural values, categories, and identities. Skillfully told narratives can break through into performance (Hymes, 1981) and command audience attention by evoking the events and atmospheres of a teller’s narrated world and imaginatively transporting both audiences and tellers to other times and places (Labov, 1997). Skilled storytellers


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wield narrative tellings as cultural tools that convey and construct social, communicative, and personal histories as well as privileged genres and values (for example, Basso, 1996; Shah, 2008). However, in the flow of everyday interactions, many narratives are brief, routine, and unremarkable in their content and their telling. Sociolinguists and developmental psychologists have more often focused on mundane narratives, particularly personal narratives in which the teller is a protagonist in the narrative being told and the narrative depicts a sequence of events that form a portion of the teller’s own biography. Much of this research focuses on narratives that are incidentally collected as part of broader projects, such as narratives offered by participants during interviews (as in Labov, 1997), captured during observations of everyday family interactions (as in Miller, Fung, and Koven, 2007; Miller, Hengst, Alexander, and Sperry, 2000; Ochs, Smith, and Taylor, 1989), or collected in the flow of young children’s self-talk (as in Nelson, 1989). The term conversational narratives evokes the routine ways that reporting or replaying of events is woven into everyday conversational interactions, allowing researchers (such as Bamberg and Georgakopoulou, 2008; Goodwin, 1990; Norrick, 2000; Ochs and Capps, 2001) to explore narrative discourse as an interactional accomplishment, to examine how particular tellings are negotiated by and distributed across participants within streams of interaction, and to trace how particular narratives may be shaped and stabilized through repeated tellings. Ochs and Capps (2001) have argued that the routine, repeated, and often contested conversational tellings of personal narratives offer participants opportunities ‘to air, probe, and otherwise attempt to reconstruct and make sense of actual and possible life experiences’ (p. 7). Of course, not all narrative discourse in conversational interactions focuses on events of tellers’ lives nor are the events of conversational narratives always noteworthy or contested. Narrative discourse in conversations also organizes unproblematized reporting of past events; planning of future events; retellings of stories heard, read, or seen (the latest episode, for example, of a favorite television series); and sketching of imaginary or hypothetical scenarios. Indeed, in face-to-face interactions people’s routine and fluid navigation of narrative discourse is particularly striking as tellers and audiences alike shift between and weave together the here-and-now of narrative tellings with the layered and shifting indexical grounds of other discursively represented times, places, and events. Focusing on conversational narratives not only allows researchers to examine the content and functions of a full range of narratives (small, fleeting, or incomplete narratives as well as extended and highly polished ones), but


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also shifts attention to narrative discourse as an interactional resource that participants deploy as they make sense of, and manage, their own and others’ participation in social interactions. As a researcher studying the social and communicative impact of acquired brain damage, I have particularly examined communication and aphasia.1 Clinical accounts often describe individuals with aphasia as being able to communicate better than they talk, that is, as individuals whose communicative competence is better than, though masked by disruptions in, their language abilities (Holland, 1998; Kagen, 1998). Much of aphasia research has focused on cataloging and differentiating language deficits in individuals with acquired brain damage. However, in all but the most mild of cases, aphasia disrupts not only the isolated performance of individuals but also the typical communicative practices of all participants in an interaction. Indeed, to communicate successfully, individuals with aphasia and their communication partners must work together to reorchestrate the semiotic resources of communicative interactions and redistribute the burden of meaning-making in interaction. This critical distinction between aphasia as an isolated impairment and its place in communicative practices is eloquently captured in Goodwin’s (1995) description of Rob’s experiences: When Rob was in the hospital, his doctors, who had focused entirely on the trauma within his brain, said that any therapy would be merely cosmetic and a waste of time, because the underlying brain injury could not be remediated. Nothing could have been farther from the truth, and medical advice based on such a view of the problem can cause irreparable harm to patients such as Rob and their families. As an injury, aphasia does reside within the skull. However, as a form of life, a way of being and acting in the world in concert with others, its proper locus is an endogenous, distributed, multiparty system. (p. 255) My research has focused on examining patterns of successful communication between routine communication partners, one of whom has aphasia. I have begun to document the successful deployment of a range of highly recognizable discourse practices, including collaborative referencing (Hengst, 2003), reported speech (Hengst, Frame, Neuman-Stritzel, and Gannaway, 2005), and verbal play (Hengst, 2006). Unsurprisingly, the disruptive effects of aphasia were quite evident across these analyses, as the partners with aphasia routinely produced


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syntactic, semantic, phonemic, and articulatory errors and displayed false starts, long silences, and prosodic disruptions. However, despite managing aphasic disruptions, these pairs flexibly negotiated the complex, often subtle frame shifts associated with developing and sustaining shared perspectives on objects and references, establishing and shifting voices in reported speech, and juggling contesting frames in verbal play. Indeed, the partners both with and without aphasia used these recognizable discourse practices to contextualize and make sense of each other’s words and actions. This chapter articulates an approach to narrative discourse as semiotic remediation practice and illustrates that approach by examining the ways narratives operate as communicative resources in the interactions of familiar communication partners, one of whom has a diagnosis of aphasia. Examining the discourse of participants managing aphasia highlights situated practices at play in everyday narratives-in-use. Attending to semiotic remediation – that is to ‘the laminated multimodality of any moment of communicative practice as well as semiotic transformations over short and long time frames’ (Prior, Hengst, Roozen, and Shipka, 2006, p. 740) – offers a way to understand how communicative competence can exceed linguistic competence in interactions of individuals with aphasia. The ability of individuals with aphasia to engage in complex, frame-shifting discourse practices so successfully and yet with sometimes quite limited linguistic signaling also helps us to see beyond the bright lights of language, to recognize how much communicative weight other semiotics can and routinely do bear.

Conversational narratives as semiotic remediation practices In earlier work we argued that ‘reported speech’ – which actually refers to the discursive representation of reporting words (oral or written), thoughts, or speech acts from other (real or imagined) times, places, and agents – should be conceptualized theoretically as one highly marked face of semiotic remediation practices available to, and used by, participants to organize communicative interactions (see Prior et al., 2006). In this chapter, I am exploring the implications of conceptualizing narrative discourse practices as another marked face of semiotic remediation. Much like reported speech, narrative discourse can be described broadly as the re-presentation of events (and related background, detail, affect, consequences, etc.) from other (real or imagined) times and places, and involving other characters (including past, future, imagined, and


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hypothetical ‘selves’). Metadiscursively, both reported speech and narrative discourse involve an indexical decentering that laminates the discursively constructed indexical ground of the narrated or reported events onto the here-and-now indexical ground of the event of narrating or reporting (see Hanks, 1990; Haviland, 1996; Prior et al., 2006). Also consistent with reported speech, the actual veracity of events being (re)presented in the narrative telling is not critical to the deployment of narrative discourse. Events and details of narrative representations can be filled with embellishments, fantastical or hypothetical events, and presentations of what might have happened, but did not. As a marked and pervasive semiotic remediation practice, narrative discourse provides a familiar pattern within and around which individuals can organize their participation (for example, as ratified audiences or co-tellers), orient to one another’s words and actions (as, for example, both centered in and decentered from the here-and-now), and integrate reported events and their interpretations into a holistic sense of what is being communicated and why. Theoretically, taking up conversational narratives as semiotic remediation practice pushes us to attend to the emergent, or improvised, aspects of specifically situated narrativesin-use as well as to more stable and recognizable aspects of narrative discourse. This next section then considers how to align methodology to this theoretical framework by describing the strategies and tools that I have drawn on and adapted for the analysis of conversational narratives and aphasia.

Identifying narratives and narrative tellings Attending to the paradigmatic dimensions of narratives and narrative tellings provides the means to hone in on and operationally define stretches of narrative discourse within conversational interactions. To do that work, I have drawn on Labov’s (1997) description of the core linguistic elements of narrative texts and Ochs and Capps’ (2001) framework designed to capture the distributed and emergent character of narrative tellings. Focusing on temporal representations in texts, Labov (1997) described narrative ‘as a technique of reporting past events through temporal junction’ (p. 15) and defined narratives as containing at least one temporal junction (that is, two temporally related linguistic clauses). More elaborate narratives have multiple temporally related clauses presented as complicating actions (the what happens next) that move the narrative forward (through a beginning, a middle, and an end). The key point of the narrative can be highlighted as the most


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reportable event (often the least common or most influential event), and the teller’s interpretations or evaluations of the narrated events can be marked by rhetorical devices or with directly stated evaluative clauses. Focusing on narrative tellings, Ochs and Capps (2001) offer five dimensions – tellership, tellability, embeddedness, linearity, moral stance – to characterize the diverse ways narrative tellings are organized, presented, and taken up in conversation. Within this framework, each dimension is a continuum with one end representing highly canonical narratives (well-ordered narrative with clear linearity and consistent moral stance) and well-performed tellings (a single narrator telling a highly engaging narrative, as a performance detached from the surrounding conversational activity, to an attentive audience). However, conversational narratives more commonly have noncanonical characteristics on one or more of these dimensions – more than one teller, poorly told or unremarkable narratives that fail to capture audience attention, tellings that are embedded in and interrupted by conversational activity, and/or narratives with contested or unstable linearity or moral stance. In our research on conversational narratives and aphasia (Hengst and Duff, 2007; Pratzel, 2008), my colleagues and I adapted Labov’s definition to operationally define conversational narratives as minimally two elements: the verbal or nonverbal presentation of an event displaced from the moment of telling that is linked to a second temporally related event or a related evaluation. Using the identification of key narrative elements as the starting point, and guided by Ochs and Capps’ (2001) five dimensions, we then reexamined the surrounding discourse for additional verbal and nonverbal narrative elements distributed across participants and throughout the conversational activities. This operational definition and identification process allowed our research team to reliably identify stretches of discourse in videotaped data as narrative.2

Multisemiotics of narrative tellings Taking up a focus on semiotics as embodied and situated practice complicates views of narrative as primarily encapsulated linguistic text or patterns of interactional talk. The richly embodied and performed character of narrative discourse can easily be seen in highly polished narrative performances in which tellers hold their audiences’ attention by weaving together gestures, postures, facial expressions, actions, voices, and physical props as they describe, display, and interpret narrative events. It can also be seen in the careful planning that goes into


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choreographing both verbal and nonverbal elements of artful performances, such as planning out a comedy skit (see Prior et al., 2006). The routine multimodality of narrative discourse is also seen as tellers blend verbally and nonverbally produced narrative elements. Such semiotic blending was evident in an analysis of reported speech and aphasia (Hengst et al., 2005; Prior et al., 2006), when participants with and without aphasia would point to indicate the original speaker of their direct reports instead of verbalizing the speaker (for example, he said). In an exploration of the heterogeneity of narrative discourse, Hengst and Miller (1999) described two-year-old Kurt’s fluid weaving of the at-hand objects and activities of his own family’s garden into a series of (re)tellings of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Through linguistic and gestural deixis, Kurt animated his tellings by pointing to the plants that Peter Rabbit had eaten (for example, ‘ate that one’ [pointing to a marigold]) and the areas that Peter had spared (for example, ‘Peter not stepped in this stuff right here’). The complex multisemiotics of embodied spaces also entail the strategic deployment of particular types of resources (visual, auditory, olfactory, thermal, haptic/tactile, and so on) and sets of behaviors to manage the multiple frames or attentional tracks of ongoing activities (see Goffman, 1981; Kendon, 1990; Scollon and Scollon, 2003). The orchestration of resources around different attentional tracks was a dominant feature in our analyses of a family make-believe game called Cindy Magic (Hengst and Miller, 1999). First played by my husband and threeyear-old daughter on a long car ride, Cindy Magic was tuned to the affordances of car travel (players buckled into their seats, driver needing to watch the road, few props available) and consisted of improvisationally acting out scenarios by speaking in character voices. Across eight years of play, Cindy Magic continued to be a verbal game routinely played while participants were completing family chores (such as running errands or folding laundry). Talk was dedicated to, and taken up as, part of the game world, whereas family chores were managed and coordinated nonverbally (for example, stacking folded laundry in appropriate piles).3 Attending to the multiple semiotics of interaction pushes us to account for narrative tellings as embodied accomplishments achieved through, and within, the affordances of material environments and the embodied and discursive alignments among participants.


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The production of laminated interaction orders in narrative tellings As gatherings of co-present participants align physically and discursively to one another they construct and display highly recognizable patterns



of interaction, what Goffman has termed interaction orders (Goffman, 1981, 1983; Kendon, 1990; Scollon and Scollon, 2003). Recognizable interaction orders function as semiotic resources, allowing participants to read and display particular alignments by participants’ patterns of movement and direction of attention. Goffman describes routine ambulatory units that indicate people who are walking alone (as singles), traveling in groups (as withs), or forming lines or processions. Interaction orders also distinguish people in ratified interactions who are engaged in a shared and exclusive group activity (such as a family reunion at public park or a service encounter in a department store) from people in loosely formed groups who are engaged in casual and fleeting contact (for example, casual conversations among people waiting for a bus). Among such recognizable interaction orders, Goffman also includes platform events set before audiences (public lectures, concerts, movies, and so on) and celebrative social occasions that are usually preplanned and highly anticipated and involve participants coming together under controlled (for example, invited) conditions in appreciation of a shared event or circumstance. Interaction orders in practice are dynamic, laminated, and emergent – as people navigate and manage their participation in platform events and celebrative occasions they do so, for example, in ambulatory units and ratified interactions; likewise, spontaneous and fleeting platform events and celebrative occasions can take shape within ambulatory units (as passersby, for example, stop to watch and applaud a street performer or citizens congregate in an unplanned vigil at the site of a tragedy). In addition to aligning to each other’s physical co-presence, Goffman (1981) also describes ways that participants take up recognizable stances, or footings, within and around the activities they are engaged in. Focusing specifically on ‘talk’ in face-to-face interactions, Goffman offers a range of stances that participants take toward the production and reception of utterances. Production formats describe the complex ways that utterances can be animated by particular people, authored by the same or other participants, while potentially representing the perspectives of a different set of participants (a student, for example, reading a set of announcements compiled by the school secretary, submitted by teachers, and written in compliance with school board policies). Participant frameworks focus on the reception side of interaction, capturing ways that individuals are positioned as ratified participants in the talk, as bystanders or overhearers not directly addressed, or as eavesdroppers working to conceal their participation.


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In their prototypical, or canonical, form narrative tellings evoke a platform event in which participants align themselves either as audience or (co)tellers. All narrative discourse may carry with it this marked prototype effect, invoking, at least fleetingly, platform formats of formal storytelling. If the identification of narrative-as-text, of foregrounded patterns of interactional talk, and of highly recognizable forms of social gathering highlight the regular and recognizable character of narrative as discourse practice, then it is also important to attend to the subtle, emergent dynamics of narrative rooted in, for example, the situated and laminated weaving of interaction orders. Mapping the indexical grounds of narratives To understand the contextualizing practices of language-in-use, Hanks (1990, 1996a) focuses not only on the marked indexicality of particular language forms, such as deictic expressions of space (this, that, here, there) and participation (you, I), but also on the fluid way that language users organize their interpretations around the shifting perspectives of participants, relationships among objects in time/space, and projected representational worlds. Like Goffman’s (1981) footings, these indexical grounds are highly dynamic and richly laminated. Narrative discourse routinely involves a shift in indexical ground as tellers lay out (overtly or implicitly) – and audiences must be willing to posit and project – temporal frames, physical settings, and character perspectives decentered from the here-and-now.4 Haviland (2000) describes the way participants fluidly navigate through narratively transposed indexical grounds – as a teller, for example, points over his head to a mountain that only exists in that direction within the narrated (transposed) space. Narrative discourse practices, then, prototypically involve a massive shift in indexical grounds in two senses. First, narrative tellings afford a shift in immediate footings as they nominate the potential rights and responsibilities of ratified tellers to discursively construct narrative grounds and the potential role of the audience to receive and imaginatively enter into the world of narrated events. Second, narratives project relatively fully embodied spaces, times, objects, and people of narrated worlds. The degree to which any particular narrative triggers such massive shifts in practice varies. For example, particular narrative genres and cultural practices inform who gets to be a storyteller, what types of stories get to be fantastical or factual, and indeed what types of stories even get to be told (see Miller et al., 2007). Narrative tellings may be ineffective or interrupted, failing to transport audiences to the


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affectively lived experiences of narratives that Labov (1997) highlights, and, as Ochs and Capps (2001) point out, conversational narratives are often not full-blown performances, and narrative stances of tellers and audiences are not always fully taken up (in, for example, contested or flatly told narratives). On the other hand, for familiar partners, such shifts in indexical ground can be accomplished through quite minimal semiotic signaling, as a delicate linguistic or gestural reference evokes an elaborately known narrative world. Considering how the interactional affordances and sociocultural consequences of participation in narrative discourse are changed or sustained for individuals with aphasia is then a question with theoretical and human significance. The narratives I analyze in this chapter are ones that tended to realize striking shifts in the centered and decentered indexical grounds of the tellings, even if fleetingly. Yet in these cases, as with all narratives, the indexical dynamics of narrative as a marked practice makes it an important communicative resource that gives particular shape to discourse.

Narrative tellings as sociohistoric trajectories Taking up narratives as semiotic remediation foregrounds the multiple dialogic processes involved in narrative practice. Bakhtin’s (1981) conceptualization of chronotopes – fully situated space/times – offers us a valuable tool for tracing the way sociohistorical trajectories flow through narrative discourse. Grounded in histories of real-life experiences and repeated engagements with narrative representations, tellers evoke chronotopes as they situate their narratives, motivate characters’ actions, and engage audiences in particular affective and interpretive evaluations of narrative events. Chronotopes then lay out not only an indexical field of space-time coordinates, but a dialogic field thick with history, affect, motive, personality, and sense. Bakhtin also usefully raises the issues of coordinating represented chronotopes (such as those of narrative events) with the embodied chronotopes of the present interaction. Locating narratives chronotopically brings multiple historical trajectories into the foreground, not only projecting a there-and-then to relate to a here-and-now, but also projecting layers of dialogic production and reception, the shadow conversations (Irvine, 1996) that infuse sense-making and the production of people through chains of participation in practices (Lave and Wenger, 1991). Scollon (2008) uses the term discourse itineraries to describe particular complex, historical paths of resemiotization spanning a variety of times, places, people, media, and objects.


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In analyzing the chains of semiotic remediation relevant to particular narrative tellings, we should attend to the multiple temporal cycles/scales (Lemke, 2000; Scollon, 2008; Scollon and Scollon, 2004) implicated in dialogic itineraries. In the immediate turn-taking time frame of interaction, we can trace immediate repetitions and recycling of resources (Norrick, 2000). In the somewhat broader frames of an extended session or series of sessions at a site, we can read narratives against a chain of topics and strings of narrative (re)tellings. At the scale of personal relationship, we can locate a narrative in a specific discourse itinerary of shared past conversations. Relationships track a uniquely dialogic interaction order, a shadow network of times and places knotted together by the co-presence of certain people, a historical with-ness that allows for common ground (Clark, 1992; Hanks, 1990; Irvine, 1996). Interestingly, the temporally, spatially, and culturally dispersed itineraries of personal relationships form a complexly networked trajectory through space-time that challenges the assumption that chronotopes come neatly organized in coherent and bounded scenes. At the scale of ontogeny, narrative discourse itineraries may be marked along benchmarks not only of development (childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age) but also of significant life events (marriage, parenthood, war, pre/post-stroke). Finally, narratives also cycle within longer, larger cultural time frames. Attention to the dialogic dimensions of narrative calls on us to seek out both recognizable histories (such as cultural discourses on driving) and also emergent phenomena (like fleeting references to particular, shared driving experiences). Attending to the dialogic effects of chains of action and chains of semiotics requires close attention to the historical depth of interaction orders and to the historically situated sense that infuses a narrative text with its powers to transport listeners imaginatively.

Conversational narratives and aphasia The narrative tellings presented here were taken from semistructured interviews conducted during a broader study exploring the situated discourse practices of individuals with aphasia and their routine communication partners (see Hengst, 2003, 2006; Hengst et al., 2005). I completed 12 videotaped observations of each participant pair, which included four interviews, four observations of the pairs engaged in activities of their choosing at home and around the community (for example, cooking at home, eating at a restaurant, attending a high school football game), and four sessions in which the pairs completed multiple


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trials of a barrier task held in a clinic setting. Preliminary analyses of conversational narratives on portions of the data set (Hengst and Duff, 2007; Pratzel, 2008) have documented that narrative discourse was pervasive (averaging about 30 narratives per session) and often successfully deployed in these interactions, and that individuals with aphasia were active participants in narrative tellings. Although participants with aphasia actively engaged in narrative tellings – serving as active audiences and as co-tellers for over half of the co-told narratives – they were only identified as sole tellers for 11 per cent of single-teller narratives. The three narrative tellings I turn to now illustrate some important implications of taking up narrative discourse as semiotic remediation practice. All three tellings display high tellability within these interactions, despite the fact that individuals with aphasia were the primary or sole tellers.

Narrative tellings as semiotic activity This first example focuses on two brief narratives told in quick succession by Ethel at the beginning of the first scheduled interview and highlights the multiple semiotics of narrative tellings. Ethel and Barnie were a young wife–husband pair, each only 21 years old, who lived in an apartment with their one-year-old daughter. Ethel had a diagnosis of moderate–severe nonfluent aphasia as the result of a left-cerebralhemisphere stroke 14 months prior to the study. In addition to aphasia, the stroke left her with a persistent right-sided weakness that made walking difficult and left her right arm hanging uselessly by her side. Formal language testing indicated that her reading and writing abilities were severely impaired and her auditory comprehension and spoken language were moderately to severely impaired. In unstructured conversational interactions Ethel’s speaking turns were marked by sparse and halting output, poorly articulated speech sounds, and a limited range of grammatical forms. Ethel’s mean length of turn (MLT)5 was only 2.0 words, in contrast to Barnie’s MLT which was 7.4 words. Despite their ongoing management of Ethel’s moderate to severe aphasia, analyses have documented that much of Ethel’s and Barnie’s discourse was very engaging and playful, with Ethel flexibly deploying gestures, facial expressions, shifting voices, exaggerated prosodies, and singing in combination with her relatively limited verbal productions. Analysis of their discourse during the four community observations documented frequent and effective use of reported speech (Hengst et al., 2005). Given her limited use of spoken language, she relied heavily on nonlinguistic


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resources (such as gestures, postures, voicings, intonations) to shape often telegraphic and single-word utterances into direct reports of others’ talk. In fact, individually Ethel had the highest frequency of reported speech use (17.4 reported speech episodes per 1000 words) of any of the 14 participants (7 participant pairs) in the analysis. The narratives I turn to now also display this combination of expressiveness and strong reliance on multiple semiotics. Ethel’s ‘He just gets it’ narratives Ethel produced two ‘He just gets it’ narrative tellings at the beginning of the interview, across just over a minute of interaction. We were sitting together in Ethel and Barnie’s living room, as shown on the still frames in Figure 5.1 – Ethel (E) and Barnie (B) are visible on the left and right sides of the images, respectively, their daughter walking around between them (staying close to mom). Ethel is facing the television (not visible in the image), and I (Julie = J) am sitting just off-camera to the bottom right of the image. I (Julie) begin the interview complimenting Ethel and Barnie on how well they had played the barrier game earlier that week, and then, as shown in the first line of Figure 5.1, ask them how do you work together to make it successful? Barnie responds I don’t know, and Ethel looking at Barnie attempts a halting one-word response Compom-tin-sen, which neither Barnie nor Julie understands. Julie offers a verbal reformulation Competition that Ethel immediately rejects – No [still looking at Barnie]. Barnie then offers his own reformulation Comprehension? that Ethel immediately accepts verbally and nonverbally – Mhm [nodding and smiling]. Barnie nods in agreement and rephrases Ethel’s point verbally – Yeah, we comprehended. Emphasizing that it is Barnie that understands her, Ethel points to Barnie and says all the time. All three participants took speaking turns, sharing overtly in this conversationally produced word search. Ethel’s first narrative. With her basic answer to my question communicated, Ethel then launches a brief narrative illustrating how Barnie knows all the time what Ethel is trying to say and speaks the words that she is unable to say for herself. Ethel directs this narrative primarily to Julie, who participates as an active audience, while Barnie is a relatively motionless and quiet audience. Ethel presents a series of three direct represented speech/thought events, demonstrating a past (or hypothetical) conversation during which Barnie helped her find a particular word. Ethel sets up the narrative offering a target word she could not say, then represents first her own thoughts, then Barnie providing the words


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120

E: B: J:

I don’t know. Wha- what- how do you work together to make it successful? ∗ Compom-tin-sen

∗M

hm. [smiling]

Comprehension? Competition? speaking tentatively, looking at B

∗ E,

E: B: J:

No.∗

∗E

still looking at B

All the time. . . . Say . . . Walmart∗ ∗ Yeah,

∗B

∗E

nodding head

∗∗ What’s

your

we comprehended.

∗E

nodding head

points to B

∗∗ E

points to self

E: name? Oh go::d’. . .∗ you ‘du du du du du’ ∗∗ [deep voice] ∗ ‘Ohh! That’s right!’ B: J: ∗ E looks at & points to B ∗ E points at self ∗∗ E bobbing head, mimicking B’s voice E: Um∗ B: J:

∗ Mhm.

So he understood you, you mean. ∗E

∗E

E: B: J:

E: B: J:

Even when you nodding

looks at J, makes back/forth hand gesture between B&E 3x ∗ Yeah.

I don’t know!∗ [laugh] [laugh] couldn’t get the words out. Ahh. And how did that happen? ∗ E hand-flip, nodding ∗ E looks at B ∗

Mom. ’I

Kind of. I mean- well I just- ..2.. ∗ Did ∗J

you know you were doing that? looking at B

∗E

bends forward


E: B: J:

Figure 5.1 Ethel’s ‘He just gets it’ narratives


Julie A. Hengst 121 E: don’t understand. I don’t understand.’ ∗ YouB: J: sits up, points to B

∗∗ E makes back/forth hand gesture between E&B, 1x; ends with palm up ‘presentation gesture’ toward B ∗ E: B: I guess I’ve just b- been around her so long that I know . . .∗ J: He just gets it. ∗ E shrugs shoulders, nods agreement ∗ B makes hand circles

Figure 5.1

(Continued)

for her, and finally her verbal agreement – Say . . . Walmart [points to B] . . . [points to self ] ‘What’s your name? Oh go:::d’ . . . [points to B] you ‘du du du du du’. . . [points to self ] ‘Ohh! That’s right!’ All three reported speech/thought events are attributed nonverbally, by Ethel pointing to the represented speakers, and the middle event is also verbally framed, by her saying you while pointing to Barnie. In addition, Ethel animates each telling by enacting (through voice quality, prosody, posture, facial expressions, and sometimes verbal exclamations) her own frustration at not being able to say the word (first event), her relief or excitement at Barnie’s offer of the correct words (third event), and change in speakers (using, for example, a deeper male voice when animating Barnie in the second event). Ethel closes the narrative with a nonverbally presented coda, or evaluation, by gesturing back and forth (three times) between her and Barnie. As an active listener, Julie offers a verbal reformulation of Ethel’s final gestures – So he understood you, you mean. Even when you couldn’t get the words out. Ethel accepts Julie’s reformulations verbally and nonverbally – Mhm [nodding] Yeah [hand-flip, nodding].


∗E

∗∗

Ethel’s second narrative. I (Julie) follow up on this narrative by reformulating the original interview question and asking Ethel – And how did that happen? – that is, how did Barnie know what the right word was? Laughing, Ethel answers emphatically, as if in amazement – I don’t



know! Julie redirects the question to Barnie – Did you know you were doing that? Barnie answers hesitantly – Kind of. I mean- well I just-. Without setup, Ethel then launches a second narrative, again directed to Julie, that emphasizes the uniqueness of Barnie’s abilities by contrasting his routine correct understandings to that of other people, particularly Ethel’s mother. This second narrative is minimal, consisting of one event from some unspecified time during the past year (that is, since Ethel’s stroke) that is linked to a nonverbally presented evaluative statement. Presented in one turn, Ethel uses verbally framed direct reported speech to act out her mother’s lack of understanding – Mom. [bends forward, looking at daughter] ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand.’ She animates her mother’s words, using a somewhat blank facial expression and a slightly Southern-accented voice that conveys a kind of determined lack of understanding, and a posture that acts out her mother’s talking down to her as if she were a frustrating young daughter. Then sitting up straight she offers a nonverbal evaluation by pointing to Barnie and reusing the back-and-forth hand gesture (one time) from the first narrative. Julie again verbally reformulates this gesture as – He just gets it. This narrative telling has the same rich semiotic blendings of the first, through Ethel’s richly enacted event (bending forward and speaking in complaining voice) and Julie’s cross-modal re-presentation of the evaluation. Moreover, Ethel folded her daughter into the enactment; while speaking as her mother Ethel bent forward, as if talking down to a child, and directed her gaze toward her own daughter. Interestingly, her daughter responded to Ethel, looking back at her and holding her gaze during that narrated event. This local alignment between Ethel and her own daughter was fleetingly laminated with Ethel’s silent stance with her mother and her mother speaking down to her. A chain of semiotic reformulations Within the immediate time frame of this minute of interaction, these two narratives are part of a chain of semiotic reformulations as Ethel and Barnie respond to the original interview question. Both narratives stand out as detached from the back-and-forth turn-taking of the conversational interaction. Ethel as sole teller completes each narrative in one long speaking turn (about 16 and 8 words for each narrative), which is in stark contrast to her average 2-word turns. However, as reformulations and clarifications of Ethel and Barnie’s original response – yeah we comprehended – these narratives are deeply embedded in the conversational topic and interview activity, a local chain of reformulation that begins with Julie’s and Barnie’s attempts to clarify Ethel’s initial


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one-word response to the question, continues with the two contrasting narratives that Ethel deploys to elaborate first Barnie’s understanding and then her mother’s lack of understanding, and ends with my verbal reformulations of Ethel’s final evaluations of each story. This chain of semiotic reformulations seems to succeed by the end in Ethel’s conveying that Barnie just gets it and that he is very unique in that regard. Across the broader time frame of Ethel and Barnie’s participation in the research project (about one month), this theme recurred directly as Ethel repeatedly claimed that, in contrast to her relationships with everyone else, Barnie was the only one who understood her and that nothing had changed in her interactions with him. Indirectly, these contrasting narratives (Barnie just gets it; her mom doesn’t understand) also stood as a frame to interpret other stories of communicative successes (others like Barnie who just get it) and failures (others like her mom who don’t understand).

Weaving together conversational and narrative frames This second example is a more extended narrative telling presented by Mary during the pair’s third interview. The rich multisemiotics of the first example are also evident here; however, this narrative telling is particularly striking because of the way it is embedded within the ongoing conversational interaction. Mary and Rob, a mother and son, were 47 and 16 years old, respectively, and lived together in their family home. Mary had a moderate-severe fluent aphasia due to a left-cerebral-hemisphere stroke only six months prior to the study. Although she had no residual difficulty walking or using either arm or hand, Mary’s performance on formal language testing indicated that she had severe deficits in repeating words and phrases, moderate–severe deficits in both auditory and reading comprehension, and mild–moderate deficits with spoken and written production. In unstructured conversational interactions Mary struggled to find and form specific words, producing long speaking turns that were marked by frequent grammatical and word choice errors, the use of nonwords (that is, paraphasias and neologisms), hesitations, and false starts. Mary’s MLT was 8.1 words, in contrast to her son Rob’s, which was 9.9 words. Mary was a very motivated communicator who routinely used gestures to act out her meanings and was persistent in working through communication breakdowns (for example, attempting words repeatedly, trying to spell words out loud or write them on paper). Mary and Rob were animated interactional partners – routinely speaking at the same time, competing for the floor, and contesting each other’s


Julie A. Hengst 123



accounts and response. Indeed, their interactions often took on a verbal sparring character. For example, Rob would use Spanish or German, languages his mother did not speak, whereas Mary would tease Rob about his wrong answers and playfully brag about being better at the game than he was. The narrative telling in Figure 5.2 is striking not only for its content, but for the rich interanimation of the narrative and conversational discourse and the ongoing lamination of multiple topics into and around this telling. Mary’s ‘You’re gonna DI::E of this!’ narrative Mary’s ‘You’re gonna di::e of this!’ narrative occurred early in the interview, before I (Julie) began asking questions. The conversation began with Mary’s news that her sister, Carole, was moving to Alaska. This news was clearly a current topic of family conversations; on this occasion Rob was looking at a map of Alaska and Mary was holding a stack of computer printouts of information on Alaska she had gathered from the Internet. Conversational topics leading up to Mary’s narrative included discussion of the family’s camping trips, how Carole was afraid of bears, opinions about the good parts of Alaska, and how Mary had been trying to change her sister’s mind by saying that Alaska was going to be awful and the only thing there to eat would be whale blubber. Figure 5.2 is a transcript with just over a minute of interaction that includes the narrative telling and begins with Mary’s comment – Carole’s gonna go crazy with me – which seems to foreshadow the narrative she is about to tell. Rob, continuing to study the map, comments on his aunt’s choice of towns – Why couldn’t she have gone to Anchorage, or Fairbanks? Or Juneau? Juneau’s the best of the three. During these comments, I carry a stool across the room in order to sit by them; as shown on the images in Figure 5.2, Mary and Rob are sitting together on the sofa (Mary on the left and Rob on the right), each holding and looking at texts, and I am sitting across from them. As I (Julie) get ready to sit down, Mary looks up and begins recounting a recent conversation with Carole in which Carole was upset because Mary had essentially told her that she was going to die in Alaska – She thought I was ma- that I was- be- mad. Cause I really- told her she was gonna die. I said, ‘You’re gonna DI:E of this!’ But it’s it’s because I’m worried about her really. It could happen to her. She’s real hea::vy. And she’s- I don’t think she’ll be good. The narrative is presented as two events (what Carole thought, what Mary said) followed by evaluation and background statements. What Mary had said to Carole is the most reportable event, which Mary repeated, recasting it as enacted direct, or quoted, speech


124


125 M: Carol’s ∗ gonna go crazy with me. R: J: ∗ M looks at T

∗∗ She thought I was ma- that I M: ∗ R: Fairbanks? Or Juneau? Juneau’s the best one of the three. J: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ∗ M nodding, looking at R & map, ∗ M looks at J, smiles

M: was- be- mad. Cause I really- told her she was gonna die. I said, ’you’re gonna ∗ This is the best part of Alaska right down∗ here at the bottom R: Oh [laughing - - - - - - - - - - - - - J: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - – - - - - - - - - - - - - - -∗ ∗J

∗R

M: T: J:

sits down

tracing area on map

∗ DI::E

of this!’ But it’s it’s because ∗∗ I’m worried about her really. It could happen

- - - -laughing- - -]

[coughing] ∗∗ M

∗M

nodding

leaning forward

Figure 5.2

Mary’s ‘You’re gonna DI::E of this!’ narrative


Why couldn’t she have gone to Anchorage, or ∗- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ∗ J picks up stool, carrying it across room


126 to her. She’s real hea:vy∗ . And she’s- I don’t think she’ll be good.

She’s ∗∗ prime meat for those bears. [smile]

∗M

touches hands to both shoulders

∗∗ R

M: T: J:

∗ She

leaning toward & looking at M

is. It could take- she could take she could take ∗∗ two or three. ∗ [laugh] ∗∗ [laughing]

[laughing- - - - - - - - -] ∗ M nodding, looking at R ∗∗ R leans back, looks away from M

She coWell maybe ∗∗ M

leans toward R, gestures with left hand ∗M

leans back, looks at J

∗ M: She thinks- she thinks she T: She could feed them for the winter. . . . Anyway. J: she’ll lose weight up there. ∗ M looking at J, nodding, wringing hands

M: T: J:

might. But I said ‘I’m just worried. . .about you’ and I do.∗ . . . But but because I

∗M

M: T: J:

bending head down

really I got to a real mean, to her, about it. And I thought she do- she does- . . . that But ∗ ∗R

M: T: J:

she was mad at me about it, cause I-

Figure 5.2 (Continued)

glances at M

so Look you were being too strong on it? ∗ J nodding ∗ Cause


M: T: J:


Julie A. Hengst 127 and that. But I said ’you know I really talking to everything and finding∗ ∗ at

this. ∗∗

∗R

looking, pointing at map ∗∗ J nodding

∗M

M: T: J:

holds up papers So I am. But . . . I would

about everything.’ [laughing]

∗------------∗ Right.

. . .So its like you’re excited too. ∗ J nodding ∗R

M: T: J:

∗∗ like her to be able to tell things and I ∗ hear everything. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - You know if you’re gonna- if you’re going ∗M

M: T: J:

shaking head

cups left hand by ear

∗∗

M & J look at R

to move to Alaska, . . . ∗ move to the south. ∗ that’s the beautiful part. The forests are there ∗R

Figure 5.2

∗R

looks at J, gesturing over map

(Continued)

(see the second image in Figure 5.2), and Julie responded to by laughing and exclaiming – Oh. Rob at first does not appear to align as an audience to the narrative telling, as he continues looking at the map and even makes a comment during the telling that continues his earlier topic – This is the best part of Alaska right down here at the bottom (first image, Figure 5.2). Overlapping with the end of Mary’s narrative telling, Rob initiates another speaking turn – She’s prime meat for those bears. This time Rob aligns himself to Mary by physically leaning and looking toward her (third image, Figure 5.2) and by blending the narrative background about his


M: T: J:



aunt’s weight into our previous conversation about bears in Alaska and Carole’s fear of bears. Mary takes up this joking stance, aligning with Rob’s comment by laughing, leaning toward Rob, agreeing and extending the joke – She is. It could take- she could take she could take two or three. Julie, looking at Mary, interrupts Rob’s attempted response and brings the joke back to the narrative by offering an alternative interpretation of what might happen to Carole in Alaska – Maybe she’ll lose weight up there. Rob recasts the joke as another ending for his aunt in Alaska – She could feed them for the winter. At this point, with the two interactional frames (Rob’s conversational banter and Julie’s narrative offer) foregrounded, Mary realigns with the narrative frame by continuing to look at Julie, linking the weight loss possibility back to previous conversations with her sister and then continuing her narrative telling – She thinks- she thinks she might [nods, looks at J]. But I said ‘I’m just worried about you,’ and I do . . .But- but I- because I really I got to- real mean, to her, about it. And I thought she- she does . . . that she was mad at me bout it. Cause I-And that. But I said you know I really talking to everything and finding about it- [laughing]. As an active audience, Julie offers agreement and recasts Mary’s disrupted narrative elements into smoother evaluative statements – Cause you were being too strong on it? and Right. So it’s like you’re excited too. The narrative telling ends with Mary’s coda, essentially wishing that she and her sister were able to talk through this better – But. . .I would like her to be able to tell things and I hear everything [M cups left hand by ear]. Throughout Mary’s telling, Rob makes more attempts to shift the conversation, looking at Mary, pointing and calling attention to the map – Look at this. After the narrative coda, Julie and Mary realign with Rob, looking at him while he talks – You know if you’re gonna if you’re going to move to Alaska then move to the south.

Laminating participation frameworks and indexical fields This narrative telling foregrounds the rich lamination typical of conversational narratives. As the interview was about to begin, the participants were engaged in, and coordinating their conversation around, multiple related activities (for example, Rob studying the map of Alaska, Julie pulling up a chair, Mary waiting for Julie and sharing news about her sister’s upcoming move). As Julie sat down, Mary directed the narrative telling to her, laminating a fleeting platform order onto the conversational interaction. Rob, however, maintained a different stance, more consistent with the preceding one, by continuing to look at the


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map of Alaska and offering comments (overlapping with Mary’s narrative telling) that were critical of his aunt’s choice and focused on the geographic desirability of different cities in Alaska. Julie aligned with Mary’s telling as a narrative audience, looking at Mary, laughing appropriately at the high point, and not responding directly to Rob’s conversational comments. In addition to simultaneously managing the multiple footings of the immediate interactional framework of these three participants, across the narrative telling the participants wove together multiple indexical grounds: Mary’s past conversation with her sister, projected future hypothetical consequence of the move (such as Carole will die, or become food for the bears, or lose weight), the geography of Alaska, Mary’s current concerns both for Carole’s well-being and the status of her relationship with her. The participants fluidly coordinated their contributions and orchestrated resources to successfully navigate multiple footings and chronotopic laminations of this narrative telling.

Narrative trajectories and narrative shadows The last example, which is the most canonical telling of the three examples presented here, is a personal narrative told by Louise during the pair’s third interview. The telling displays rich interanimations with a series of past and anticipated future narratives and conversational topics, foregrounding the long histories of interactions leading up to the current telling. Louise and Thelma were mother and daughter, who at the time of the study were 50 and 26 years old respectively. Although not living together, they spoke on the phone or in person daily. Louise had a mild residual aphasia due to a left-cerebral-hemisphere stroke four and a half years prior to the study. In addition to the aphasia she had a residual right-sided weakness that caused her to limp and keep her arm bent and held close to her side. Formal language testing indicated that her reading, writing, auditory comprehension, and spoken language were good, and her greatest difficulty was word finding. In unstructured conversational interactions Louise’s speaking turns were generally well-formed and grammatically complex, but marked by hesitancy in producing, or pronouncing, particular words. Louise’s MLT was 5.6 words, in contrast to Thelma’s, which was 7.5 words. Across these observations Louise and Thelma were engaging yet respectful communication partners who actively listened to each other, appeared to choose their words carefully, and frequently joked and laughed together.


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Louise’s driving narrative occurred after the interview was over. We had turned to scheduling the remaining research sessions, including a final aphasia testing session that only Louise needed to attend. Louise and Thelma indicated that Thelma would come with Louise to all of the sessions, in order to drive, which prompted me to ask if Louise had gotten her driver’s license yet. Louise responded that she had not, which set off a five-minute discussion about driving. Directly and indirectly, the discussion focused on the need for Louise to get her driver’s license. Louise expressed reservations about driving one-handed (due to her paralyzed right arm), Thelma said that Louise was ‘just chicken,’ and I offered examples of people who successfully resumed driving after their strokes. Thelma argued that her mother was capable of driving, but that ‘she just needed to try,’ adding that she had been ‘pushing for this for years.’ Louise argued that she did not know how she would get a car anyway, a point Thelma countered by saying that getting the license was the first step and after that ‘Aunt Shirley would be more than happy to get you a car’ or Thelma herself would buy her mom a car. At that point Louise returned to the question of driving one-handed, asking if she would need a special steering wheel. Thelma responded that Louise had already driven one-handed, and told the story of how several years ago (when they were arguing about driving) she had taken her mom out to the country and forced her to drive a regular car, which she did – ‘you drove with your other foot, you used your one arm, you turned around, you did everything.’ I suggested that adapting to physical limitations (like driving one-handed) was not as problematic for people as not being aware of what was going on around them, a problem that Louise did not have. The transcript in Figure 5.3 shows the last minute of the driving discussion beginning with Louise’s response to me (Julie) that she has to do that (keep track of what’s going on around the car) for everyone she’s driving with, and Julie’s acknowledgement – Right, exactly. Thelma responds nonverbally to this exchange by pointing at Julie and nodding (as if saying ‘you got that right’) and putting her head in her hand. Laughing, Louise points at Thelma and offers Julie a succinct evaluation – She hates it. Thelma continues, verbally remediating her evaluation of Louise into an argument that her mother should be able to drive, a move which simultaneously recasts her mother’s positive comment (I have to do that for everyone) into a description of Louise as a backseat driver – And she can put on the brakes, and she can do all that in


Louise’s ‘And that’s how we drove’ narrative


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L: T: J:

I∗ And

she can put on the ∗ brakes, and she can do all ∗ that in the ∗ passenger seat, there’s

∗ Looks

L: T: J:

∗ points

at J

∗ points

to L

∗ points

across self to right

[laughing] . . .But, . . . my cousin- ∗ no reason she can’t do it in the ∗ driver’s seat.

∗∗

But then I do go slow

[laughing] ∗ points

L: T: J:

to L again

back to left ∗∗ looks down, shakes head ∗ L looks back at T ∗∗ My

∗ shakes

head, hand to mouth, ∗∗ L

L: T: J:

cousin . . .∗

and she yells at me for not going when I. . .there’s- okay ∗ never mind.

∗ we

∗ She

drove to Texas.

[laugh] ∗ Circles

looks back at J

drove, and I was passenger. But she

Uh huh. hand

∗ Gestures

away

turn her head this way. So I ∗∗ would always be sure to look ∗ that way, and [laughing] [laughing- - - ∗ looks over right shoulder L: T: J:

∗ can’t

∗∗ L

Figure 5.3

looks over left shoulder

∗ flicks


L: I have to do that for everyone ∗ I’m driving with. [laughing] ∗ She hates it ∗∗ T: [laugh] J: Right, exactly [laughing] ∗ arm gesture ∗∗ T points to J, nodding, puts head in hand ∗ L pointing at T

hand over left shoulder

Louise’s driving narrative


132 ∗ ...

to look this way, say∗∗ ‘YOU’RE ON!’ [laughing]∗ And that’s that’s how we . . .

- - - - - - - - - - -laughing- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -] ∗L

∗L

∗∗ L looking at J points whole arm forward

turns looking over right shoulder,

L: T: J:

we drove.∗

∗L

L: T: J:

..2.. but∗∗

Yeah. nodding

∗∗ L

See that’d concern me more than [laughing] than looks away, shrugs shoulders

∗ [laugh- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -]

∗ Oh.

than driving [laughing] than one-handed driving, let me tell ya. [laughing] ∗L

∗L

L: T: J:

looking at T

throws head back

∗∗ ∗I

∗T

nods

Yes it is∗∗

∗ it

is.

think it’s just a confidence thing that ∗ you need to get over.

looking at L looking at T

∗∗ L

Figure 5.3 (Continued)

∗ head

∗ Looks back at T, nodding point to L ∗∗ Look down, nodding


L: T: J:


the passenger seat, there’s no reason she can’t do it in the driver’s seat. Louise’s attempt to begin her narrative is interrupted by Thelma, who continues her argument by giving an example that illustrates her mother’s backseat driving – But then I do go slow and she yells at me for not going when I. . .there’s- okay never mind. Thelma breaks off her complaint, shaking her head and looking down, a stance that seems to indicate that she is giving up, having said all this before. At this point, Louise redirects her gaze to Julie and relaunches the narrative that demonstrates her own competence – My cousin . . . we drove to Texas. She drove, and I was a passenger. But she can’t turn her head this way. So I would always be sure to look that way, and. . .to look this way, say ‘YOU’RE ON!’ And that’s that’s how we . . . we drove. We realign around this narrative telling as a fleeting platform event, with Thelma and Julie taking up the stance of audience (for example, not interrupting, looking at Louise, laughing in response to the actions), and Louise presenting her narrative in one long conversational turn. Louise’s narrative telling is highly engaging, as she sets up the narrative at the beginning, builds up to the most reportable event, nonverbally acts out the events as she tells them, and recaps the narrative in a closing that stays focused on the narrative itself. Julie follows the telling with an evaluation that reconnects Louise’s narrative back to the conversational topics and essentially reformulates the stance she had taken just before Louise’s narrative – See that concerns me more than driving with one- than one-handed driving, let me tell ya’ [laugh]. Thelma then closes the entire driving discussion, also by restating her position on the broader issue, which she has apparently held for a long time – I think it’s just a confidence thing that you need to get over – to which Louise agrees. Narrative trajectories At one level, Louise’s ‘And that’s how we drove’ narrative could stand as an amusing anecdote, conjuring up a chronotope of challenged driving on the open road. However, it also needs to be read as part of densely dialogic, sociohistoric trajectories, where it fits into ongoing arguments and fragile identity work. The competing evaluations and claims that Louise, Thelma, and Julie offer display dialogic histories that go beyond the five-minute conversation, reaching back to years of past experiences, acts and conversations, and looking forward to possible futures. Louise and Thelma’s stances (both the footings they interactionally display and the beliefs/goals they argue for) appear to be well-honed in their interactional history. They openly reference this shared past when, for example, Thelma states that she ‘has been pushing for this for years’ and


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Louise claims that Thelma ‘hates it.’ They also enact their dialogic relationship through their practiced familiarity, abbreviated arguments, and quick counterpoints to each other’s claims. Drawing on years of clinical experience, Julie intervenes in the pair’s long-standing argument, noting that after a stroke people often adapt to residual physical disabilities (such as hemiparesis), but more serious problems arise for drivers who cannot see or are not aware of the road/traffic around them. This last point becomes the occasion for Louise’s narrative, prompting her to agree that she is very aware of the road and thus, in Julie’s terms, is competent. Commenting on Louise’s awareness, however, Thelma offers several representations of how (over)involved Louise is as a passenger in the car. Louise then delivers the narrative of her directing the driver, her cousin who could not turn her head, during their long cross-country drive. Louise delivers the narrative smoothly and displays her abilities by acting out her looking to the left and to the right. It is a moment where the disruptions in her competence from effects of the stroke are representationally and interactionally negated in converging accounts of her competence. It is interesting how enthusiastically Louise delivers this narrative that displays her competence, even though it sharply counters her larger argument that she is unable to drive (for a discussion of the complex dynamics of argument in everyday talk, see Ochs, Taylor, Rudolph, and Smith, 1992). Louise’s narrative leads Julie to reiterate her earlier point, one that affirms Louise’s potential, and Thelma to reiterate that the problem is confidence. Louise agrees with Thelma – somewhat ambiguously, as she does not go on to commit to getting her license. This conversational narrative telling enters into ongoing discussions of driving and disability and projects into the personal and interpersonal trajectories radiating forward from this five-minute interaction.

Conclusions I opened this chapter with an epigraph from Rachana, taken from a book that centers on stories, particularly the tales of A Thousand and One Nights, a book of stories within stories, whose framing story is that of Scheherazade the queen whose life literally depends on her being able to keep the stories going and on building her ethos through her narrative tellings. Rachana’s words resonate with Bruner’s (1990) understanding of narrative as not only externalized discourse but also culturally scripted, internalized ways of organizing our experiences of the worlds we inhabit. Narrative is a kind of interface between how we (re)construct the world in our moment-to-moment experience and how the world


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(re)constructs us sociogenetically. Narrative chronotopes are thus about trajectories of human becoming as well as a means of representing events. Taking up narrative as semiotic highlights the way that narratives are not just linguistically presented but also materially performed in embodied and physical spaces. Taking up narrative as re-mediation highlights how persons and events, experiences and imaginings, are discursively (re)presented in a narrative now. Taking up narrative as practice foregrounds the ways narrative emerges as a central nexus among, and resource for, structuring or breaking interactive alignments, for organizing or disrupting interaction orders, for meaningfully navigating and folding together flows of time. All three of the narrative cases presented here display ways that narratives are richly multisemiotic, that they play central roles in managing complexly laminated interactions, and that social and personal identities often hang on the tellings and evaluations of narratives. To align this theoretical perspective with methodological practices involves carefully repurposing methodological toolkits. As we note in the introduction to this volume, the methods for studying human activity and sense are not new. However, as we repurpose them to different theoretical ends, we need to interrogate and rework their use. For example, Labov’s (1997) account of narrative textuality, as an example of one methodological tool, was quite useful. However, for Labov, narrative moves were understood to be linguistic moves. The second narrative of Ethel’s (Mom, ‘I don’t understand, I don’t understand.’) would probably not have counted as a narrative by Labov’s criteria because so much was conveyed by gesture, posture, paralinguistics, and dialogic common ground. The three narratives here highlight how much of the work can be and is carried by semiotics other than language. The embodied performance of Louise’s smooth verbal narrative of assisting her cousin in driving makes this point as well as Ethel’s nonverbal elaboration of limited verbal productions. Aligning the theoretical perspective with methods also calls on us to focus on the mix of durable and emergent dimensions of narrative discourse. Labov’s scheme for narrative textuality and Ochs and Capps’ (2001) for narrative tellings highlight recognizable dimensions of narrative. Taking up such durable features provides ways of operationally defining and describing stretches of discourse as narrative texts. Yet each of these narrative cases also displays finely nuanced interactional work as well as the need to locate that work in the specific, extended dialogic trajectories of participants. More broadly, attending to the narrative practices of individuals with aphasia is valuable in several ways. Given that aphasia is understood


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as a marked disruption in the deployment of linguistic resources and in routine patterns of communication, attending to the communicative practices of individuals managing aphasia foregrounds the semiotic resources and work that support all narrative tellings (even highly verbal ones) and that scaffold diverse everyday interaction orders. For clinical practice, taking up these theoretical perspectives refocuses attention away from defining aphasic deficits as isolated phenomena owned by individuals to tracing the ways people collaboratively manage aphasia (successfully or not) as they wield communicative resources and act in concert with others. Finally, taking up narrative and other discourse practices as semiotic remediation holds promise for reconfiguring the study of brain–behavior relationships by respecifying what must be accounted for as we seek to understand the interanimation of minds, bodies, activities, and environments that form the dynamic functional systems of everyday worlds.

Appendix: Transcription conventions and key Sample transcript segment M: T: J:

∗

She thinks- she thinks she She could feed them for the winter. . . . Anyway. she’ll lose weight up there. ∗M looking at J, nodding, wringing hands

The transcription system used here was designed to track the ongoing participation of gatherings of individuals engaged in communicative interactions (see Hengst, 2001). Similar to a musical score, the transcript is presented as a series of temporally contiguous segments with each segment wrapping one to the next. Segments display a speaking line for each participant, with descriptions of gestures and actions (marked by ∗ ) included beneath speaking lines. Talk is presented in standard orthography, including contractions (e.g. won’t, gonna) and common vernacular (e.g. okay, yikes). For the purposes of this analysis, mispronunciations typical of aphasic errors were also presented with standard spelling conventions. The sample transcript above shows an interaction among three co-present participants (M, T, J), all three participants speak, overlapping talk is evident when M interrupts T (She thinks- she thinks), and a gesture/action notes are described for M at the same time that J is speaking.


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Bold text Italic text [bracketed text] ∗

... ..2.. ::: [low pitch] hi Dave ., ? !

talk/gestures coded as narrative elements during narrative tellings quiet, whispered, or soto-voice audible gestures, such as laughing, presented in speaking lines timing of participant’s gesture/action relative to surrounding talk, with description of gesture/action displayed below speaking lines (as written descriptions and occasionally with thumbnail photographs) pause, or silence, of less than one second pause, or silence, in seconds indicated by numeral and surrounding periods colons were used to mark prolonged sounds, one colon about 1/2 second dash marks an abrupt stop in speaking description of how the underlined text was voiced punctuation marks represent prosody, specifically: a period (.) represents phrase/turn final prosody; a comma (,) represents mid-turn phrase boundaries or intonation patterns consistent with presenting a series of items; a question mark (?) represents phrase-final questioning prosody; an exclamation mark (!) represents phrase-final exaggerated, emphatic, or exclamatory prosody

Notes 1. Traditionally, aphasia is defined as an isolated language disorder acquired by individuals as a result of focal damage to the dominant, usually left, hemisphere of the brain (see Benson, 1979; Davis, 2007). Although the particular presentation of symptoms varies across individuals and with the site and size of the brain lesion, the defining characteristic of aphasia is a marked deficit in the production and reception of language across all modalities – for example, spoken and written language production, and auditory and reading language comprehension. Aphasia deficits are primarily limited to language comprehension and production with sparing of other cognitive– communicative abilities (such as nonverbal memory and problem solving, judgment and insight, planning and pragmatics). 2. Even including disrupted and incomplete narrative fragments, Pratzel (2008) found that this definition allowed 70 percent agreement between two research


Transcription key



teams in identifying the same stretches of discourse as narrative, with 35 commonly identified narratives out of a combined total of 50 narratives identified by both teams. In many cases, the disagreements on the remaining 15 stretches of discourse involved different ways narrative discourse was bounded and parsed (a stretch of discourse, for example, coded as two narratives by one team, and as one narrative by the other team) rather than failures to identify stretches as narrative. 3. This finding resonates with the work of Rogoff and her colleagues (Rogoff, Mistry, Goncu, and Mosier, 1993) who have documented the way that management of multiple semiotic channels of attention accomplishes culturally specific patterns of child rearing. 4. The layering of multiple, decentered indexical grounds is, of course, not unique to narrative discourse. Reported speech, for example, routinely layers not only multiple speakers, but also multiple times and places, into single utterances (see Haviland, 1996; Hengst et al., 2005; Prior et al., 2006). 5. MLT (total words/total interactional turns) was calculated on the four community observations for each pair as part of a previously reported analysis (Hengst et al., 2005).


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Resemiotization of a Policy Initiative: Promoting Open Disclosure as ‘Open Communication about Clinical Adverse Events’ Rick Iedema University of Technology, Sydney

Introduction This chapter addresses how Open Disclosure as national health reform policy resemiotized across practices, sites, and genres in Australia. This discussion is central to appreciating not just the innovative ways in which contemporary policymakers approach policymaking (Jorm, Banks, and Twohill, 2008), but also the opportunities that this new modality of policymaking affords social researchers. Open Disclosure provides a unique case study of how policy reform ranges across much more than bureaucrats drafting and distributing formal guidelines: they now liaise intensively with governmental, nongovernmental, and consumer stakeholders, and they become involved with scenario testing, simulation training, redevelopment, and targeted evaluation of policy plans and implementation processes. The kinds of semiotic transitions that accompany these processes are the concerns of the present chapter. Resemiotization (Iedema, 2000, 2001) was coined as a notion to address the ways that practices transition meanings (the content plane) across different structural phenomena (the expression plane). The notion finds its origin in Jakobson’s intersemioticity (Jakobson, 1971a) and Eco’s concern with ‘semiotics whose expression plane is another semiotics’ (Eco, 1976, p. 55). Where semiotic remediation privileges the multiple and complex flows through which meanings are mediated


6

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and project one another (Prior, Hengst, Roozen, and Shipka, 2006), resemiotization serves to highlight how practices capitalize on making meanings traverse across semiotic modes towards increasingly nonembodied (exosomatic) phenomena. These intersemiotic traversals capitalize on specific semiotics’ affordances, of course. For example, music affords affective meanings better than semiotics based on numerical signs, whereas the latter offer more powerful abstractive and calculative opportunities. These traversals may also harness semiotics’ potential for ‘meaning storage.’ The storage of meaning is a prominent preoccupation of the industrialized nation state, which ‘records itself in an essential way, on the world outside – on nature, on stone, on wax, on clay, on paper, on film, on tape, in its railway networks, its streets, its freeways . . . ’ (Wilden, 1980, p. 408). The present chapter considers the extent to which the principle of disclosure of clinical incidents becomes inscribed into increasingly ‘essential’ ways across a growing number of modes and media. For its part, Open Disclosure is a policy initiative that promotes ‘open communication with patients and their nominated support person following an adverse event’ (Australian Council for Safety and Quality in Health Care, 2003, p. 6). In their attempt to limit litigation payouts and patient complaints, as well as reverse the credibility deficit that is affecting the health care sector in terms of growing public scepticism about its safety (Committee on Quality of Health Care in America, 2000; Eurobarometer, 2006), policymakers in Canada (Disclosure Working Group, 2008), the UK (National Patient Safety Agency, 2005), the US (Clinton and Obama, 2006) and Australia (Australian Health Ministers’ Conference, 2008) have begun to promote openness about errors and failures occurring in health care. The idea of disclosing errors openly and honestly was adopted in the late 1980s by a Veteran Affairs Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, following on from an early Montreal-based initiative (Kraman and Hamm, 1999; Peterkin, 1990). Going against conventional legal advice, disclosure was proposed to preempt victims of clinical harm involving lawyers and initiating lawsuits against health facilities and individual clinicians. In health care, and since the first court cases were initiated against doctors in the nineteenth century, legal advice has dictated that no information about errors and failures should be communicated to victims of clinical harm. The Montreal/Lexington experiment has revealed that the silence that has tended to shroud adverse clinical events may be misguided. Research has shown that victims of clinical harm who turned into complainants and litigants feel that an explanation, an


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apology, and reassurance that similar errors or failures would not happen again was all they expected to hear (Gallagher and Lucas, 2005). Legal reform has since sought to facilitate disclosure, to enable representatives of health services to apologize without having to fear that what they disclose is admissible in court and can be used against them (Vines, 2007). Clearly, contemporary policy such as Open Disclosure is formulated and promulgated in highly complex ways. As Jorm et al. (2008) point out, as little as 18 years ago health policy in New South Wales (Australia) was still distributed on paper memos to limited numbers of people. These memos were typed up and sent to carefully defined circular lists. These lists included a set number of officials in specific places in the bureaucratic system, potentially including groups ‘vital to the policy’s implementation’ (Jorm et al., 2008, p. 194). It was, they note, the responsibility of those on the circular list to pass on the memo’s message to others whose work was implicated in the new policy. The advent of email, the Internet, and widespread communication networks has enabled policymakers to communicate in faster, more direct, and less circumspect ways with a much larger contingent of stakeholders, including the public. This also means that policy is no longer primarily circumscribed by the activity of drafting abstract guidelines. On the contrary, policymakers are being much more proactive than they were in the past with regard to getting feedback before they commit to policy specifics, involving stakeholders in the policy formulation process, and evaluating the policy following its publication in order to adapt it to emerging responses, critiques, problems, and successes. This means that, in contrast to two decades ago, policy is no longer disseminated along relatively linear channels. Rather, policy now transmutes across a variety of stakeholder forums, documenting practices, promotional media including training and simulation, and finally, all kinds of formative and summative evaluations. To elaborate these issues in relation to the trajectory of Open Disclosure, this chapter is structured as follows. First, I address the theoretical background of resemiotization in greater detail. I then describe the shift in public policymaking from circulating paper documents towards involving crucial stakeholders in the formulation, enactment, and evaluation of new initiatives. Following that I turn to an empirical analysis of the formulation and promulgation of Open Disclosure in Australia. This enables me to consider the implications of the complex dynamics of Open Disclosure policymaking in Australia specifically, and of the rising complexity of policymaking generally. The chapter concludes


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by pointing to the significant opportunities that this complexification of policy remediation offers social researchers.

Resemiotization captures how practices manifest intersemiotic shifts. A prototypical example is linguistic meanings emerging in domains where such meanings were absent, as occurs in Heidegger’s ‘bidding the thing into nearness’ (see Edwards, 1990, p. 90) and Merleau-Ponty’s ‘ante-predicative becoming predicative’ (see Descombes, 1980, p. 60). This process of the prelinguistic becoming linguistic (Thibault, 1997) has been referred to as linguistification (Habermas, 1987, p. 77), capturing the transition of more or less subconscious imagery into linguistic representation (Thibault, 1997). Another typical phenomenon, labeled delinguistification (Habermas, 1987), is linguistic meaning being reframed nonlinguistically. Examples of delinguistification include the shift from linguistic articulations into technical design, numerical calculation, building, and so forth. But both linguistification and delinguistification are notions that aim to get at semiotic change while privileging language. In contrast to these notions which position language as our theoretical point of departure, and as does Fairclough’s (1992) concept of intersemiotic transformations, resemiotization addresses the principle and the possibility of social change itself. The advantage of this latter more general focus on social rather than linguistic or even semiotic change is that it enables us to engage with what Bourdieu terms universalization (Bourdieu, 1994). Bourdieu proposed the notion of universalization to capture the enhanced pragmatic relevance (for a broader populace) of semiotic phenomena. Enhanced practical relevance is also critical for Callon and Latour, but they focus on the materiality of intersemiotic shifts and its rising gradient of resistivity: ‘we will only retain for the analysis gradients of resistivity and consider only the variations in relative solidity and durability of different sorts of materials’ (Callon and Latour, 1981, p. 284; their italics). For example, talk may be more negotiable, and so less resistant, than print; print is generally more negotiable, and so less resistant, than architectural design;1 and so on. Together, the notions of universalization and resistivity enable us to focus on how possible it is for actors in the here-and-now to contest specific meanings’ universality (their generalized meaning) or their resistivity (their resource-intensive expression form).


Resemiotization


While resistivity is principally a material characteristic, it can be achieved at the content level as well. For example, it can be realized by transforming talk or writing into visual representation and design, or by transforming design into built construction, and so on. It is also achieved by transforming congruent and personalized kinds of interaction into metaphorical and abstract kinds. This latter process backgrounds and sometimes elides specific personal, temporal, and spatial details, anchoring what is meant to a point in space and time that the speaker/writer can identify with, or challenge. The shift away from the here-and-now of personal interaction makes the knowledge that pertains to these new abstract forms implicit, assumed, and embedded in social practices whose ‘authority’ becomes distributed more widely across agencies and resources (Iedema, 1998). This investment and concomitant distribution serve to limit the individual agent’s ability to challenge or transform what is at issue. Encompassing these concerns with universality and resistivity, resemiotization focuses on practices enabling semiotic phenomena to shift from one practice context to another; such as from the laboratory to the classroom, from the planning meeting to the architectural design, from the bureaucratic context to the professional context, and so on (Iedema, 1997). In general then, resemiotization captures transfigurations whose dynamic shifts from relatively temporary or ephemeral (because congruent and somatic and therefore more easily negotiable) practices and resources, into relatively durable or lasting (extrasomatic) practices and resources. The resultant phenomena come to harbor ‘objectified histories’ (Bourdieu, 1981, p. 305) as embodied in our roads and railway lines, for example. They are the outcome of specific interactional agreements on what constitutes acceptable meanings and doings, with the power to constrain our comings and goings in more or less lasting ways. Resemiotization can be generalized as being a process that limits and resolves social difference. This effect does not remain at the same level of semiotic organization as the original differences, because that would leave them open to (re)negotiation. Resemiotization crucially involves the reconstitution of such resolutions at new levels of semiotic organization whose materiality and arrangement of content downplay difference. Such shifts remove the interaction from here-and-now specifics into a domain where knowledge of such specifics is either assumed or strategically backgrounded and rendered relatively nonnegotiable. Such shifts may remove meaning from the explicit medium of language into the iconic medium of visual design (Sebeok, 1994), and from there into


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the indexical domain of the built environment (Iedema, 2001; Sebeok, 1994). Each shift involves the mobilization of increasing amounts of extrasomatic resources, alongside more intense kinds of work needed to accomplish the shift and maintain the relevance of its outcome. For all intents and purposes, then, resemiotization construes increasing degrees of consensus, or nondifference, through stakeholders’ work and resource investment. The work and investment analyzed here center on promoting the disclosure of incidents across a field where secrecy has for decades now been the norm. Methodologically, resemiotization requires us to understand, ethnographically speaking, the field where particular stakeholders are operating and where investments are being pursued. Resemiotization is not describable in terms of textual transformations (although textual transformations may partly index it): it is only fully describable in terms of social or organizational developments. As noted earlier, resemiotization is concerned to describe the universality and resistivity of (material) representations as these are borne out by how actors enact particular practices. It is therefore in the first instance an ethnographic endeavor.

A shift in public policymaking In a recent paper, Jorm and colleagues compare 1990s policy with its more recent (circa 2006) counterpart. As they point out, besides being printed on paper and typed with a typewriter, the 1990 policy document framed its statements in an authoritative tenor: ‘They are examples of “control and command” statements that presume the organizationally shared understanding of authority, direction and discipline that is a hallmark of classical management theory’ (Jorm et al., 2008, p. 194). In addition, the policy memo does not display a logo as does the later policy example the authors analyze, pointing towards an assumed legitimacy and familiarity on the part of its readers. The earlier policy document, they further note, would have ‘included brief stakeholder consultation through to central composition by a single author’ (Jorm et al., 2008, p. 194). The document contains no references to research evidence or to other related government reports or previous circulars. It was sent out to only 136 officials. Nowadays, policymaking operates at multiple levels, including:


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definition of the problem in terms of service provision for clinical stakeholders, detailed reference to the current evidence, a methodology – the process of consultation and development


for the policy (e.g. a reference group consisting of participants/representatives of a number of specified groups and the outcome of their deliberations), consideration of risks of implementation, identification of those who have the responsibility to implement the policy (if it was at a sufficiently high level it would be included in managers’ and practitioners’ performance contracts), links to multiple other relevant policy documents, and often inclusion of implementation tools, mechanisms for monitoring, and at times evaluation requirements. (Jorm et al., 2008, p. 195) This list makes clear to what extent contemporary policymaking differs from its earlier counterpart. Seen from a resemiotization perspective, the differences in policymaking manifest in two distinct ways: relationally and discursively. The relational dimension has to do with those who are party to policy formulation, implementation, and evaluation processes. It maps the community of practice that forms as a result of, and to assist, the new policy coming into being. The discursive dimension maps the semiotic processes that come into play with the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of the policy initiative. Here, we can think of the spoken, written, visual, and other semiotic manifestations that the policy as text mobilizes. As will become evident in my discussion of Open Disclosure below, all these manifestations come into play in the resemiotizations of its policy. The number and complexity of shifts, moreover, highlight the intensity of negotiation invested in this policy and are also a marker of its sensitivity. But as policy, Open Disclosure is mediated by a strong moral imperative that centers on a belief in its justness: victims of clinical harm deserve to be told when they are harmed, they deserve to be apologized to, and they deserve to be provided with sufficient means to know they will not be disadvantaged as a result of the error/failure during the rest of their lives. As materialization of this moral impulse, Open Disclosure transmutes across a great variety of discursive and relational practices, creating novel collaborations and outcomes. To illustrate how resemiotization can capture a complex social development such as that at the heart of Open Disclosure policymaking, the next section describes the eight-year trajectory from ministers approving the formulation of the Open Disclosure Standard in 2000, to states publishing their local Open Disclosure policies, to the National Health Ministers’ Conference signing off on an agreement to render Open Disclosure part of national policy in 2008.


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With the publication of the Quality in Australian Health Care Study (Wilson et al., 1995) it had become clear that clinical error and hospital failure in Australia were of the same magnitude as, and in some regards even bigger than, those originally reported in the USA (US Institute of Medicine, 1999). Between 10 and 16 percent of hospital patients were found to experience adverse events, with 3–4 percent of that proportion suffering severe disability and death. This gave rise to considerable concern in Australia, and motivated state ministers to focus on ensuring and improving patients’ safety and the quality of health care. Ministers signed off on the formation and funding of a government-funded body in 2000 called the Australian Council for Safety and Quality in Health Care. One of the tasks assumed by the Council, apart from a range of other quality and safety initiatives, was the promotion of Open Disclosure. This task became particularly acute during the indemnity crisis in 2001, when a large insurer, HIH, collapsed under the weight of litigation payouts following a number of high-profile clinical incidents. The Australian government proceeded to put laws in place that capitated or set an upper limit on these payouts (Australian Health Ministers’ Advisory Council [AHMAC], 2002). Another strategy for coping with the threat of litigation following adverse events was Open Disclosure, an effective approach to reconciling consumers with clinicians and health facilities, and therefore to limiting the risk of complaints and lawsuits (Kraman and Hamm, 1999). The Australian Council for Safety and Quality in Health Care proceeded to put a process in place by means of which Open Disclosure would be formalized into national policy. Broadly speaking, this process unfolded over the next eight years and included the following six milestones: 1. Stakeholder involvement; invitation for submissions; literature review; legal review (2001–2) 2. Drafting of the Standard (2002–3) 3. Publication of the Standard and accompanying materials (2003) 4. Controlled implementation of an Open Disclosure pilot and its independent evaluation (2006–7) 5. Recommendation involving an evaluation summary presented to the Australian Health Ministers’ Conference (2008) 6. National ministerial endorsement (2008–)


The Open Disclosure policy initiative in Australia


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I address each of these milestones here to explain their role in the resemiotization trajectory.

Following on from initial and informal consultation processes, the Council moved on three fronts. First, an issues paper was prepared and circulated to a wide range of stakeholders (Australian Council for Safety and Quality in Health Care, 2002). This set in train an extensive national consultation process with a range of groups – consumer groups, indemnity and insurance representatives, accreditation bodies, educators, hospital and health service managers, legal professionals, government departments, and complaints bodies – and an invitation to these groups to send submissions to the Council (Australian Council for Safety and Quality in Health Care, 2002). Simultaneously, a prominent academic who had been Health Care Complaints Commissioner in New South Wales was contracted to do a literature review on Open Disclosure (Walton, 2001). Third, a legal team had been charged with providing a summary of the legal issues surrounding Open Disclosure, resulting in the Corrs Chambers Westgarth Legal Review being published in January 2002. As these processes bear out, the general principle of Open Disclosure began to traverse discourses of clinical risk, insurance assessment, legal constraint, and practical feasibility. In that sense, its uptake across these discourses and associated fields constituted a rapid linguistification of matters and concerns that heretofore had not been granted articulation in the Australian context. 2. Drafting the Standard Extensive stakeholder consultation, an overview of the academic research evidence, and an analysis of the legal issues pertaining to Open Disclosure provided the resources for the Council to appoint the Standards Australia Committee on Open Disclosure, which began drafting the Open Disclosure Standard in 2002. One important difference between an earlier draft of the Standard (#5.2.05.08.02) and the Standard that was ultimately published was that the draft contains a subsection on legal issues on page 14, about two-thirds of a page. The final version of the Standard devotes four pages to legal issues in a separate section. This latter four-page section now addresses complex legal matters, including information that is privileged or excluded by ministerial decree from being admissible in court, and the reach of the Freedom of Information Act in so far as clinical errors are concerned. Clearly, the


1. Stakeholder involvement; invitation for submissions; literature review; legal review



Standard is concerned to contextualize the disclosure of adverse events with warnings about the ways in which victims are able to access adverse event information and use it to initiate court action. In contrast, an important commonality between the draft and the final version of the Standard concerns the emphasis on disclosure encompassing the apology. Both documents make clear that disclosure is not a purely factual form of communication, but also an interpersonal one. From early on in the Open Disclosure policymaking process, the apology was appreciated as playing a central role in the success of Open Disclosure for victims. Its centrality in policymakers’ thinking for reconciling frontline staff with the initiative is far less clear. Nevertheless, these discourses enabled different stakeholders – insurers, clinical– professional organizations, consumer groups and policymakers – to develop positions with regard to Open Disclosure. These negotiations and deliberations ultimately led to the development of the Australian Open Disclosure Standard.

3. Publication of the Standard In July 2003, the Australian Health Ministers’ Conference endorsed the Open Disclosure Standard: a national standard for open communication in public and private hospitals, following an adverse event in health care (Australian Council for Safety and Quality in Health Care, 2003; see Figure 6.1). The publication of the Standard heralded a turning point in Australia’s relationship with Open Disclosure and has been recognized internationally as a policy feat (for example, Canadian Patient Safety Institute, 2006). Its publication shows that it is possible to bring together those intent on creating a fairer environment for victims of adverse events with lawyers, managers, and insurance representatives whose main concern is to manage and limit the risks incurred by adverse events. The Standard’s balanced discourse, particularly that surrounding the articulation of the disclosure apology, is indicative of how multiple interests and voices needed to be dedifferentiated in order to come together in this disclosure guideline. For instance, to limit legal liability while still signaling to the victim of harm that those disclosing the incident are well-intentioned, the Standard adopts the ‘partial apology’ – an apology that allows for an expression of regret, but not for an admission of guilt. The discursive compromise, in this case, is that clinicians can say ‘I’m sorry for what happened,’ but not ‘I’m sorry for what we did wrong.’


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Figure 6.1

Front cover of the Open Disclosure Standard in 2003

4. Controlled implementation of Open Disclosure At a State Quality Officials Forum meeting on 4 February 2004, state representatives agreed that their jurisdictions should take responsibility for implementing the National Open Disclosure Standard. The Council facilitated this process by developing supporting documents, including posters, brochures (such as Figure 6.2), a checklist, and a fact sheet. These educational materials and support tools were intended for distribution in health departments and health care facilities as means to alert clinical and administrative staff and the public of the main principles of Open Disclosure. What is evident from examining these materials (such as the brochure in Figure 6.2) is their authoritative and confident tenor. Like ads, they are brightly colored, the people in them look happy and confident; their language is assertive (big fonts, lists of items indicating settled knowledge), and different stakeholder groups are addressed (patients, families, visitors, as well as frontline staff). One poster announces, ‘Hospital management are committed to improving the safety of our patients through the Open Disclosure process,’ and it continues assertively with ‘Management will . . . .’ This rising authorization of the Open Disclosure initiative is also evident from the checklist document and the fact sheet. They too frame knowledge about the initiative in certain and confident terms,


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Figure 6.2 Cover of a brochure on open disclosure

with the kinds of questions people may have about it being provided with clear answers. The Council subsequently agreed that it would fund a National Open Disclosure Pilot Program to involve all states and territories. It was recognized that delicate negotiations were necessary across multiple jurisdictions to ensure support for the pilot program. This pilot program began in 2006, with 42 sites across Australia agreeing to contract with the Commission to trial Open Disclosure and report on its progress. The funding that came as part of the contract enabled jurisdictions to pay for Open Disclosure officers responsible for working with frontline staff on adverse event disclosures, and arrange Open Disclosure training for volunteer clinicians and managers. In parallel to this contractual arrangement, the Commission tendered an external evaluation team to interview staff across the 42 sites who had led or participated in Open Disclosure meetings, and consumers who had been offered Open Disclosure. The author of this chapter, together with 12 colleague researchers, won the tender. The evaluation


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tender contained a clause requiring the evaluation team to publish results in the academic literature, resulting in an article in the Medical Journal of Australia (Iedema et al., 2008). This publication formally introduced Open Disclosure into the medical domain by being the subject of an article in the medical profession’s flagship journal. Other articles have since appeared elsewhere, further promulgating and legitimating the finding that frontline staff approve of disclosure and the apology to victims, and that patients and caregivers regard existing disclosure practice as inadequate with regard to their expectations as victims of harm. 5. Recommendation to the Australian Health Ministers’ Conference A summary of the Open Disclosure Evaluation Final Report was presented to the April 2008 Australian Health Ministers’ Conference. Upon being informed about the encouraging results of the Open Disclosure Evaluation, the ministers agreed to sign off on Open Disclosure on a national basis. After more than eight years, and five years after the publication of the formal Standard, Open Disclosure policy was adopted for national implementation by ministerial announcement (May 2008). 6. National implementation of Open Disclosure Since the April Conference, and to prepare the way for this national rollout, the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care has been arranging meetings among insurance and indemnity officials, clinical–professional associations, legal experts, state-based ‘Safety and Quality’ managers, health care complaints commissioners, consumer organizations, and academic researchers. Policymakers at the Commission know that each of these stakeholder groups is crucial for the success of Open Disclosure over the coming years. Of course, national implementation brings new resemiotization challenges. For example, the legal reform agenda needs to be respecified: what aspects of disclosure are privileged (made legally secret); should the country move toward no-fault legislation such as exists in Scandinavia and New Zealand;2 and, how are personal liability and individual blame from now on to be framed? The Commission now faces the challenge of convening legal experts, government representatives, health care professionals, and consumers in an attempt to get them to consider how the legal context can be made more amenable to Open Disclosure. With health care professionals expecting special protection as a precondition for participating in clinical incident investigation, the line between what is to stay privileged (secret) and what should be able to be made


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public remains hard to draw. It is likely that it is in this legal arena that the future of Open Disclosure will be determined, providing the backdrop for clinicians’, insurance and indemnity companies’, bureaucrats’, and managers’ faith in participating in the disclosure of and apology for adverse events. At the same time, however, pressure is building through public resentment about the hospital scandals aired in the media on a near-daily basis. In all, Open Disclosure provides a critical test case of how tensions and contradictions among contemporary legal, political, and consumer interests play out.

Discussion The above trajectory included complex relational and discursive moves. Stakeholder groups across professional organizations, clinical associations, governmental, nongovernmental and legal institutions, as well as consumer organizations, needed to be involved and be kept on board. The support of those whose responsibility was to protect the financial viability of health organizations and of those for whom disclosure was a moral-ethical obligation was crucial to the success of this policy initiative. Indeed, the real complexity and apparent incommensurability of these parties’ interests and concerns must have seemed hugely daunting for those initially charged with realizing Open Disclosure. In this chapter we have only skimmed across the surface of what must have been very difficult meetings, challenging submissions, undermining statements made through the public media (such as the Australian Medical Association’s claim that Open Disclosure would not work ‘in the current legal climate,’ Phelps, 2003, p. 2), and intense suspicion on the part of those involved in adverse events, and who now were asked to approve of their disclosure. Discursively, the trajectory of Open Disclosure meandered from tentative publications such as the Issues Statement and the Draft of the Open Disclosure Standard, towards a raft of highly prominent, colorful and visual materials following on from the Standard’s publication in 2003. At the same time, the discourse of consultation and involvement (‘please,’ ‘invitation,’ ‘proposal’) that characterized the initial phases of this process transformed into a discourse of authority (big posters and large numbers of brochures) and knowledgeability (‘checklist,’ ‘Standard,’ ‘what we will do’). Concomitantly, the community of practice that congregated around Open Disclosure and identified with its discourse grew from a select group of experts and interested parties, to hundreds of frontline volunteer staff across 42 health facility sites, and now on to the general public through notification via the public media.


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Growing from a single policy statement (the Open Disclosure Standard), Open Disclosure discourse has begun to permeate governmental decision making, academic research, and the general health workforce through its publication in international journals, on websites and newsgroups, and the rollout of disclosure training. This trajectory could be described as one of authorization, to capture its mobilization of resources, knowledge, and people with the aim of rendering Open Disclosure part of the health policy and clinical practice landscape. Open Disclosure also provides a space where consumer groups can begin to collaborate with health services rather than, as in the past, remaining disenfranchised and often in opposition to health departmental decisions and rulings. Given the momentum that these networked relationships and discursive remediations have generated, it is unlikely that normalizing secrecy about adverse events will ever be possible again in health care. As one staff member interviewed as part of the Open Disclosure Evaluation noted, ‘now there is no going back.’ The resemiotizations of the disclosure principle across the various textual and contextual circumstances have been multiple and complex. Unfortunately, the trajectory sketched above contains nothing but the barest outline of the processes and practices involved. But what is evident is that there is a proliferation of meanings permeating legal, contractual, insurance-related, and clinical practices and discourses. As linguistifications of spheres heretofore lacking articulation, the various reports produced about the Open Disclosure policy extend the field of concern from a single principle – be open about clinical incidents – into complex discursive articulations and practice arrangements at state, area, and hospital levels, and from there into the everyday discourse practices of hospital managers, clinicians, and even patients and caregivers. Open Disclosure discourse also traversed an increasing range of semiotics: from limited governmental documents into all sorts of spoken and written forms. This unfolding drew on but also exceeded intertextual development, in that we are concerned here with linguistification of matters heretofore not articulated, abstraction through the manipulation of discursive grammars (from congruent into less congruent formulations limiting the possibility of renegotiation), and delinguistification (transitions from language into visual, colorful, and design-based representations). Through these complex processes, Open Disclosure was eventually able to be shown in the form of visual and colorful representations including both confident designs and personalizing photo shots of satisfied clinicians and patients. In that regard, a parallel can be drawn here with the process of delinguistification introduced


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earlier (Habermas, 1987). Delinguistification, in Habermas’ account, is a kind of ‘consensus formation’ in media other than language (Habermas, 1987, p. 184). It is the process whereby a certain meaning (difference) is recontextualized from one medium (for example, language) to another (for example, money or infrastructure) that embodies greater universality and resistivity. As part of this unfolding, less linguistically explicit phenomena, such as the visuals that are so prominent in Figure 6.2, ‘connect up interactions in space and time into more and more complex networks that no one has to comprehend and be responsible for’ (Habermas, 1987, p. 184). Framed as delinguistification, this dimension of promoting the Open Disclosure policy initiative also consisted in accruing (or at least displaying) increasing legitimacy by colonizing a growing number of nonlinguistic semiotic manifestations, including visuals, colors, and designs. While Open Disclosure is by no means integral now to clinicians’ everyday practice, its various resemiotizations have certainly invested the general principle with greater credibility, visibility, and authority. But whether Open Disclosure will take root in and become a taken-as-given part of hospitals’ responses to clinical error will remain difficult to predict.

Conclusion Resemiotization provides an important lens for mapping phenomena such as the policy reform initiative described above. The visual and linguistic modalities of documents early on in the policy’s trajectory were tentative, black and white, nonformalized, and for specialized audiences only. Once the policy began to gain momentum, there was an explosion of documentation in full color and variable sizes for an increasingly wide range of audiences, accompanied by publications and presentations across all kinds of practices, genres, and sites. Most importantly, the Open Disclosure trajectory reveals an increasingly dense network of stakeholders and sites, interweaving not just policymakers and frontline staff, but a complex array of players, resources, and processes. This trajectory can be characterized as having moved toward increasing universality and resistivity, produced by ongoing processes of authorization. This authorization derived from growing numbers of stakeholders partaking in the discourses associated with Open Disclosure, and from rising levels of resources being invested in these discourses. Interesting too is that the trajectory sketched above differs vastly from that traversed by policies 20 years ago. Thanks to rising technological


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capabilities and increased social networking, policy reform has become a more complex and multisemiotic endeavor. Perhaps because of this too, policy reform can take on more and more ‘radical’ aims, such as being open about clinical errors and hospital failures. With much of the 1980s producing an increasingly critical press about health care service delivery in the UK (Karpf, 1988), such stinging media reporting about doctors, nurses, and hospitals only took off in Australia in the 1990s (Lupton and McLean, 1998). Due to this shift in media positioning, the Open Disclosure initiative faced not just formidable opponents in health itself but also outside of health, including an increasingly disaffected public. In the midst of all this, nevertheless, disclosure of and apology for adverse clinical events were judged to be the best ways forward. Finally, besides harboring analytical significance, the policy resemiotization trajectory sketched above is also significant for a practical reason. In showing the complexity of contemporary policymaking, this analysis provides a vista of the opportunities contemporary policymaking offers social researchers and citizens who are not experts in health. Given modern policy’s dependence on public participation and input (Skidmore, Bound, and Lownsbrough, 2006), social research into the discourses surrounding policy content is of rising interest to policymakers. Additionally, given the intensification of communicative practices and relationships across organizations and societies generally (Deetz, 2003; Hage and Powers, 1992), communication researchers are becoming implicated in policy-relevant research as providers of information about policy response, interpretation, and uptake. The general conclusion of this chapter, then, is that resemiotization provides, besides an analytical framework revealing increasing communicative complexity around policymaking, evidence of an impulse motivating social research involvement. Given the at times quite radical intentions of contemporary policymaking, such involvement can be both rewarding and inspiring.

Notes 1. Architectural designs are extremely costly to do, and big changes are generally prohibitive. 2. No-fault legislation provides that it is not necessary for the victim to initiate litigation to prove fault because fault is no longer a relevant criterion needing legal scrutiny. While this does not mean that individuals are necessarily freed of all personal blame, health facilities can immediately proceed to negotiating with victims about their financial needs and support expectations (Bismark, Dauer, Paterson, and Studdert, 2006; Davis, Lay-Yee, Scott, Briant, and Schug, 2003).


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Mediating Modes of Representation in Understanding Science: the Case of Genetic Inheritance Barry Saferstein California State University San Marcos

and Srikant Sarangi Cardiff University

Introduction In this chapter we are interested in exploring the dynamic relationship between multimodal forms of representation of scientific concepts – more specifically, genetic inheritance – and the mediated nature of interacting with such concepts in a given semiotic environment to facilitate understanding. The two environments we examine concern public educational exhibits and the biology classroom, both involving representations of genetic inheritance. Our assumption is that mapping meanings across multiple modes of representation is a commonplace procedure for interpreting textual/graphical exhibits as well as face-toface interaction. The public educational exhibits and classroom learning activities respectively afford various modes of representation, each providing advantages and disadvantages for the social cognitive processes that lead to understanding of the concepts being represented. In other words, multiple forms of representation and the interpretive procedures related to them have communicative as well as cognitive functions – they are central to interpreting information as well as to understanding concepts. We proceed as follows: first, we briefly outline the dynamic, constitutive nature of scientific knowledge, which often entails uncertainties. Then we present analysis of data from the two sites, which show


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how multimodal representation of the scientific concept of genetic inheritance both responds to and reproduces such uncertainties. Examining an educational exhibit, we explain the complexities of the textual and graphical representation of genetic inheritance. We then shift our attention to the biology lesson to address the question of how secondary school students make sense of genetic inheritance through interacting with and (re)mediating available semiotic resources, including computer simulations and co-participants, while accomplishing a classroom task. In the discussion section, we revisit some of the key analytical points emerging from both data sites and emphasize that their available modes of representation fail to externalize the cellular and molecular genetic processes (the ‘in-there-ness’) which influence the development of physiological traits. We argue that such absence of process information contributes to the difficulties in understanding the concept of dominant and recessive patterns of genetic inheritance. Our discussion also touches on the extent to which recognition of the nonlinguistic forms of expression used to cope with uncertainties challenges the dichotomous analytical categories often used to explain understandings of science. In conclusion, we revisit the relationship between professional conventions and interpretive procedures in regard to reproducing or changing approaches to understanding scientific concepts such as genetic inheritance.

Scientific knowledge and the dynamics of mediated understanding There is a long tradition of research on social studies of scientific knowledge (Collins, 1974; Gilbert and Mulkay, 1984; Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay, 1983; Latour and Woolgar, 1986; Merton, 1973; Mulkay, 1979), which suggests that scientific knowledge is far from finite, normative, and consensual. Collins, for instance, draws attention to the role of social/personal networks in advancing scientific legitimacy. Gilbert and Mulkay (1984) talk about ‘the ordered variability of scientific discourse’ (p. 57), which is premised on scientists’ selective use of two interpretive repertoires: empiricist and contingent. The former is characteristic of experimental research reports whereby ‘formal accounts are couched in terms of an empiricist representation of scientific action’ (p. 40). The latter, which is couched in personal and social circumstances, tends to be ‘excluded from the realm of formal discourse’ (p. 40). Also relevant are notions of declarative and procedural knowledge (Bobrow and Norman, 1975; Brown and Duguid,


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2000; Winograd, 1975), which build on Polanyi’s (1958, 1967) argument that science is not purely rational, linguistically expressed calculation or description, but involves tacit, nonformal judgment, intuition, and personal knowledge that are not linguistically manifest. Uncertainties surrounding scientific knowledge and the interface of declarative and tacit procedural knowledge also characterize how the lay public and school students cope with understanding abstract concepts. In science education settings, research may focus on the rhetorical and the multimodal environment, including the facilitative role of technology, to analyze how one learns to be scientific (Kress, Jewitt, Ogborn, and Tsatsarelis, 2001). However, in order to explain how students learn scientific concepts and methods, we also have to recognize how the complexities of representing scientific concepts, using tools such as a computer simulation or an exhibit featuring pictorial, textual, and mechanical representations, may contribute to partial understandings or understandings that do not transfer to settings lacking the simulation or exhibit. In that regard, Medved and Oatley (2000) have considered museum visitors’ recall of information and concepts presented by educational displays vis-à-vis the production of different types of memory. They categorize the information that visitors recall in terms of two types of memory: episodic and semantic. They find that visitors recall events such as operating an interactive display or experiencing various components of an exhibit (episodic memory) more completely than they recall the conceptual content (semantic memory) of the display or exhibit. Like the distinction between declarative and procedural knowledge, the distinction between semantic memory and episodic memory is related to whether and to what extent certain types of information are realized linguistically. As we will illustrate through our analysis of educational resources and learning interaction, such emphasis on linguistic representation is problematic for two reasons: many of the explanatory educational resources present information in nonlinguistic forms, and the complexity of interpreting linguistic and pictorial forms of information often involves nonlinguistic communication, particularly pointing and gesturing. Central to our discussion is the assumption that human interaction involves constant mediating work to make sense of the form and content of communication triggered by the immediate semiotic environment. The indexical dimensions of linguistic and visual modes assume particular significance. Making sense of environments and activities requires people to manage the complexities of perception through patterned interaction and cultural knowledge (that is, schemas which help


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to activate information developed through prior experience embedded in particular social settings and social networks). Schutz (1964) discusses members’ sense-making practices by creating loose equivalence classes, rather than through dichotomous either/or and true–false categories. Taking into account Schutz’s (1964) ‘common scheme of reference’ and Garfinkel’s (1967) ‘practical reasoning,’ Cicourel (1973) proposes the notion of ‘interpretive procedures’ which ‘provide the actor with a developmentally changing sense of social structure that enables him to assign meaning or relevance to an environment of objects’ (p. 30, see also Grimshaw, 1980; Mehan and Wood, 1975; Smith, 1974). For Cicourel, human socialization equals acquisition of interpretive procedures and this has consequences for aligning participants’ and analysts’ perspectives, or what Sarangi (2007) calls the approximation of the ‘analyst’s paradox.’ Three of the basic interpretive procedures that underlie human interaction are particularly relevant for our purposes (see also Grimshaw, 1974): • assuming reciprocity of perspectives about perceptions and activities; • searching for a ‘normal’ form of interaction that will enable participants to communicate in the circumstances of the immediate setting; and • applying retrospective and prospective senses of occurrence through which participants deal with unclear interaction by reflecting on memories of prior relevant information or by assessing the developing interaction to fill in the missing information. We propose to extend the notion of interpretive procedures to account for more complex interactional environments characterized by multiple modes of representation which routinely require people to interact not only with co-present individuals, as in the case of science classrooms, but also with visual and aural technological resources, as in the case with science exhibits. Through such interaction, individuals link meaning to multiple modes of representation in various forms of expression (such as talk, text, pictures, tables, alphanumeric symbols, pointing, and gesture).



The dominant model of genetic inheritance Before we introduce our data sites, let us first outline the conventional model of genetic inheritance, which is based on Gregor Mendel’s studies of the characteristics of generations of pea plants. Mendel’s research



occurred prior to the existence of technologies for examining biochemical processes taking place within cells and molecules. Mendel inferred the existence of dominant and recessive genes by considering the probability of certain characteristics appearing across generations. Common approaches to teaching genetic inheritance continue to emphasize Mendel’s inferential method. They do not explicitly link currently available information about the cellular processes by which genes affect traits (for example, DNA, development of proteins) to a model of genetic inheritance (Saferstein, 2007, forthcoming). Following Mendel’s approach, educators deal with this absence of information directly linking genes and traits by shifting among linguistic terms (such as dominant and recessive), alphanumeric symbols (such as genes represented by lower- and uppercase letters, Gg, GG, gg; generations represented by F1, F2, and so on), computational devices (the Punnett Square used to organize combinations of dominant and recessive genes and compute the probability of traits appearing in a generation of offspring), and mathematical expressions (ratios expressing the probability of traits appearing in a generation). Both the genetic display discussed below and the classroom activities discussed subsequently apply the conventional Mendelian approach to explaining genetic inheritance. The widespread use of such approaches is an example of the relationship between the conventions of professional culture and commonplace educational resources.

Public educational exhibits: modes of representation of genetic inheritance Our first research site is a portable exhibit developed in the United Kingdom, intended for display in various public venues. It includes textual explanations, graphics, photos, video, and interactive mechanical devices that present information concerning genetic inheritance, population genetics, and the nature and consequences of genetically based health problems.1 The following analysis examines the modes of representation presented by the exhibit and the ways the format and content of the exhibit express models of genetic inheritance. The exhibit features various modes of representation that users must interpret and link in order to understand the concepts of genetic inheritance. The display provides an example of how (re)mediation of information across multiple modes of representation substitutes for missing naturalistic information about biochemical processes. Figure 7.12 shows the exhibit’s multiple modes of representation, which display and clarify information within and across its panels.


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Figure 7.1

Genetic inheritance exhibit

Comparison of the various modules of the installation shows an organizing schema based on linking place, family, family resemblance, genetic inheritance, and personal accounts of genetic medical conditions. However, the various types of information do not automatically explain the relationships among panels. A viewer must develop an organizing scheme, based on systematically engaging the information, in order to make sense of what is presented (for example, movement around the display, a procedure for relating text, images, and objects). Linkage depends on taking the time to read more than one of the panels and to consider how they relate to one of the themes. For example, the variety of shapes and background colors (not visible in the grayscale images here) of the areas containing text and the different sizes of the fonts correlate with different functions of the text, such as emphasis, difference between descriptive text and text explaining concepts, and instructions for using the exhibit’s interactive components (compare with Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996, 2001). However, the display does not explicitly state what those different functions are. Let us consider in more detail one of the panels which explains recessive characteristics and recessive genes in relation to eye color in humans (Figure 7.2).3 In order to understand the information, viewers




2A. Full Panel

2B. Detail of Panel

Figure 7.2 Modes of representation


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When the wheel is turned, a brown or blue disc (representing a gene for brown or blue eye color) falls from each side (respectively representing the mother and father) into the blue circle at the bottom (representing their child) Figure 7.3 Interactive mechanical wheel



• Linguistic/textual: the textual explanation presented in Figure 7.2(2B) maps the term characteristic with eye color. It maps recessive with blue eye color, and dominant with brown eye color. • Graphics: a chart uses differences in shape, size, and color to differentiate iconic figures representing a man, a woman, a male child, eyes, and eye color. Beneath the chart, a circle contains an image of chromosomes, which are not explicitly identified in the text or diagrams. • Color blocks: textual and graphic information that explains genetics concepts appears over an area marked by a somewhat transparent white background. An orange background wrapping around part of the diagram marks the text explaining the representational scheme: ‘In this exhibit the brown discs represent the dominant gene and the blue discs represent the recessive gene. The children could inherit the following genes and eye colour.’ • A manipulative mechanical device (the interactive wheel, Figure 7.3): the wheel is divided into three compartments, two of which represent parents, respectively labeled Mother or Father. Each of these two compartments contains a brown and a blue disc. As a viewer turns the wheel, the discs move, and one disc from each side falls into a third compartment, labeled Child, at the bottom of the wheel. The combination of brown and blue discs that fall into the Child area changes over a number of turnings of the wheel, representing the random assortment of the genes received from parents, a key concept of genetic inheritance. The interactive wheel in Figure 7.3 is an example of location replacing process information: that is, genes for eye color (colored discs) fall from separate locations (parents) to a shared location within the wheel (the child). The emphasis on location substitutes for information about the cellular biochemical processes through which genes influence the characteristics of organisms. A viewer may map the wheel’s compartments and the falling discs to one another and to the rest of the panel in order to clarify the concept and role of dominant and recessive genes. For example, blue and brown colors map across modes of representation as text (‘blue discs represent the recessive gene’), graphics (colors


must make sense of the relationship between its various representational devices and concepts related to genetic inheritance. We can summarize the following modes of representation used to present the concept of dominant and recessive patterns of genetic inheritance:



of symbols in the chart), and objects (colored discs in the mechanical wheel). They also map to genetics terms and concepts, that is, blue to recessive; brown to dominant. Use of the interactive wheel may lead participants to relate the operation of the mechanism to the concept of dominant and recessive genes if they interpret and link the various forms of representation. The wheel emphasizes random assortment and mathematical probability, but the accompanying exhibit panel does not explicitly present those concepts. Participants must infer randomness. The interactive mechanical device does not represent the actual eyes and their color. In order to understand that the brown disc (gene) overrides the blue disc (gene) and does not blend with it, a participant must link the outcome of turning the wheel to the panel’s graphics or text, or to prior knowledge. The wheel and the other forms of representation on the exhibit panel conflate genotype, phenotype, and the functioning of genes. The interactive wheel glosses all of these as colored discs. Rather than biochemical processes of cell division, the sorting mechanism is the manual turning of the wheel and the falling of the discs into a specified location. In the panel’s text, the word ‘receives’ indexes the discs’ change of location, and functions as a placeholder for the missing information about the cellular processes through which genes influence eye color processes (compare Saferstein, 2007). Consider the textual representation displayed in Figure 7.2: The only way that the recessive characteristic (in this case, blue eyes) will be seen in a child is if that child receives the ‘blue’ (recessive) version of the gene from both parents. If the child receives the dominant, ‘brown’ version of the gene from either parent it will show the dominant trait. (i.e. brown eyes) Receives substitutes for missing information about biochemical processes triggered by genes, suggesting a direct relationship between genes and traits or a direct mechanism by which genes create traits. In the display, the linking of various modes of representation substitutes for the presentation of textual and pictorial information about biochemical processes. The emphasis on the location and movement of genes invites inferences about how genes work within cells, rather than supplying that information. The classroom activity discussed below presents a similar emphasis on the pattern of inherited traits appearing across generations (a form of location) and the absence of information about the cellular or molecular processes of genes, such as the role of


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genes in the production of different enzymes or proteins that result in different traits. The following examples of students and their teacher interacting during learning activities designed to explain the inheritance of physical characteristics across generations show the confluence of interaction and representations, which reproduces a particular approach to understanding genetic inheritance. The biology classroom: modes of representation of genetic inheritance through computer simulation We now move to our second research site, the high school biology classroom, while staying focused on the modes of representation of genetic inheritance and how students interact with such modes. The classroom learning activities involve students using a computer software program that provides examples of genetic inheritance by simulating the breeding of generations of rabbits, some of which have straight ears and some of which have floppy ears.4 The teacher has designed the curriculum so that students can work together in groups of two to four (each group using one computer), to complete a series of tasks that sequentially provide increasingly complex aspects of genetic inheritance. Like the genetic inheritance display described above, the computer simulation features linguistic, pictorial, and alphanumeric information that students interpret and organize in order to develop understandings of the Mendelian approach to genetic inheritance. The learning tasks encourage students to make inferences about the presence and role of dominant and recessive genes. This site displays how students respond to multiple modes of information with multiple modes of interpretive interaction – that is, how mediated information prompts (re)mediating interaction.

Finding pattern: simultaneously making sense of task resources and genetics concepts In the data examined here, key concepts that the students explore are patterns of visible physical characteristics (straight or floppy ears) and the existence and role of dominant and recessive genes. In order to do this, the students must also learn to use the software interface. They are simultaneously concerned with learning how to do the task and with learning the concepts of genetic inheritance by performing the task. This is not an unusual situation in classrooms or, as the constitutive approach to human behavior emphasizes, in ordinary interaction. During any interaction, people apply basic interpretive procedures to





Figure 7.4 Software interface

construct or reproduce ways to communicate that will reflexively function to accomplish the substantive objectives of communicating (see Cicourel, 1964, 1973; Garfinkel, 1967; Smith, 1974). For example, students first must develop an understanding of the software’s sorting and organizing of the screen representations of rabbits, in order to notice a pattern of genetic inheritance. The computer software presents the concept of generations graphically by sorting the two parent rabbits and their offspring into rows that are separated from other parents and their offspring by thick grey borders forming rectangles (Figure 7.4). The information presented on the screen visually defines ‘generation’ through the proximity of rows of offspring to their parents and the lines that create separate boxes around parents and their offspring. The software also suggests a relationship among representations of rabbits by redrawing the screen when the students use the mouse to drag a representation of a male and a female rabbit into a square box at the top right corner of the screen, and then mouse-click on the screen’s run button. This results in the two rabbits appearing as parents in a row, and their offspring appearing in rows beneath them. The graphics and the changes to graphics related to use of the software are nonlinguistic expressions of:


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• the workings of the software; • categorical distinctions that map to linguistic terms, such as generations, pattern, parents, offspring; and • the relation of changes to the screen images prompted by the actions of software users with genetics concepts, such as dominant and recessive genes or traits. Such mapping of the task’s graphical symbols with linguistic representations often counts as the learning phenomenon. The transcript extracts analyzed below present two students working together to complete the assigned learning task. Transcript extract 15 [G: female student; B: male student] [Students begin to use the software] 6. B: I’m gonna run ‘em. 7. G: Run ‘em. 8. B: Alright. 9. G: Ou! . . . Oh look! (points pen at rabbits on computer screen) How interesting. What-what? 10. B: So first three that way. Second three that way then 1, 2, 3 and so (points at lower right side of screen near set of offspring rabbits) goes in a pattern so the next one should be all floppy. Then it should be/straight floppy straight ?????/. 11. G: (pointing at screen)/No. But it . but look. No no/look 12. B: (2 second pause) Yeah see. (points at 1st column in set of rabbits demarcated by box in lower portion of screen) See how the first 13. G: Yeah 14. B: starts off like that. (points at 3rd column of rabbits) See this must be the end of their like little cycle 15. G: Umm Hmm 16. B: (pointing at 4th column of rabbits) and it’s starting over again so the next one would be floppy. 17. G: (points at 1st or 2nd column of rabbits) The end of that cycle? 18. B: Yeah. (pointing at columns of rabbits on the screen) 1, 2, 3, (pointing at side of monitor as if columns continued offscreen) 1, 2, 3. You know like that.





19.

G:

20. 21.

B: G:

22. 23.

B: G:

24. 25.

B: G:

26.

B:

27. 28.

G: B:

29.

G:

30. 31. 32.

B: G: B:

33.

G:

34. 35.

B: G:

36.

B:

(pointing at a floppy-eared rabbit in 3rd column) No but did you see the one with that one like that? That No I said the one like that. It’s all down (pointing at a floppy-eared rabbit). (pointing at the same rabbit) (? ‘Those’ or ‘Oh’?) (pointing at the two straight-eared F2 parents) An’ these two are up. (The next 9 seconds are mostly inaudible. B and G look at the computer screen and the task prompt. B points pen at the F2 parents before he utters the word ‘generation’) Wait. Look. How come the ears are the same? Hm? Is it? This is it . couple two (3 second pause) That’s the female One’s a female. (looks down toward paper on which he is writing) and that that’s the male (pointing at screen with pen). Okay we’re on number three (referring to questions on the assignment sheet). (5 second pause) You know number one? (referring to the question on the assignment sheet) Hmmm? Oui or no? Umm female number one, male number tu – three, male number three. (reading aloud from task prompt) ‘How many types of ears do you see in the (points at the F2 generation on the screen) F2 generation?’ (points at column 3 of the F2 generation) Two. F2 generation, okay. (7 second pause while they silently read task prompt) (reading aloud from task prompt) ‘What is really puzzling about this?’ (pointing at screen) Because it skipped a generation. (4 second pause while they write answers to prompts)


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The talk and gesturing represented in the transcript show the mediating work students must do to construct a way of noticing and discussing pattern. This work involves verbal descriptions and questions, reading of printed assignment prompts, manipulation and interpretation of computer images, as well as selective attention to certain areas and details of those images. For example, in line 10, B uses the words ‘the first three’


to direct attention to the pictures of rabbits resulting from a particular mating and the operation of the computer program resulting in certain changes to the screen (that is, rows and columns of rabbits appearing within a demarcated area denoted as F2). He then infers a pattern of ear traits from the differences in ear shape of the rabbits in each of the three rabbit columns: ‘Second three that way then 1, 2, 3 and so (points at screen) goes in a pattern so the next one should be all floppy’ (line 10). However, his inference is mistaken: the arrangement of rabbits having different ear shapes within a generation box is random. On the other hand, G emphasizes the different ear shapes of some of the rabbits (lines 19, 20). Then she notes the straight ears of both of the rabbits in the row for parents placed above the rows of their offspring (line 23). G emphasizes the vertical arrangement of rows of rabbits separated by lines forming boxes. Such interpretive trial and error, in which participants display and adapt their immediate interpretations of information, is common in collaborative problem solving (Saferstein, 1992). The discourse (verbal and gestural) reflects the multiple interpretive frameworks that the software simultaneously affords. For example, as the students continue to consider the results of the simulation, G reads the term ‘generation’ aloud from the task prompt (line 33), referring to the screen representations (Figure 7.5). The term ‘generation,’ drawn from the sphere of practical experience of kinship, serves to mediate the interpretation of the concept of genetic inheritance displayed by the computer simulation’s vertical sequence of boxed rows of parent and offspring rabbits.

Figure 7.5



Students concurrently using talk, gesture, graphics, and text



The collaborative interpretation of the talk, text, pictures, and gestures involves the students developing a shared discourse to cope with the multiple modes of representation. This discourse links talk, images, text, and concepts through interaction involving collective cognition similar to that in collaborative design processes (Saferstein, 1992) and the optical induction in collaborative aspects of laboratory research (Amann and Knorr-Cetina, 1988). The students’ learning activity continues to be mediated through the task prompt and screen simulation. B and G mention specific traits and individuals when verbally or gesturally referring to the images of rabbits (Transcript extract 2). This moves the interaction toward finding patterns created by the screen activity and discussing reasons for them. The students aggregate descriptors of the format of the graphical representations on the computer screen, as well as the movement and change produced by the software. B adds ‘block’ (line 50) to ‘generation’ and ‘cycle’ to describe the sets of images of parent rabbits and offspring respectively grouped in areas of the screen demarcated by rectangular borders. Transcript extract 2 41. G: Quiet! (laughs) (reading aloud from the task prompt) ‘What is really puzzling about this?’ 42. B: (pointing pen at screen) That . their parents . the okay. The F2’s parents 43. G: (points pen at screen) F1 44. B: No 45. G: Oh oh okay. Sorry. 46. B: the the parents for the F2 generation 47. G: Uhuh. 48. B: both of their ears are straight . but then 49. G: There’s a pattern ./The – there’s two types ????/ 50. B: /their parents also are straight but then/. . Okay (points finger at screen) . . So (pointing at the F2 parent rabbits) these two couples are from (pointing at the F1 offspring) this block right here. So that means their parents . their mom . ./and ./ 51. G: /Recessive genes./ 52. B: . . and uh . 53. G: Recessive genes. 54. B: What the hell does that mean? . . 55. G: It’s inside you know (points pen at floppy and straight-eared rabbits on screen) like . look, (points pen at


170


56. 57.

G:

58. 59.

B: G:

the F1 female floppy-eared parent) that one . and (moves the pen across the F1 generation box) none of them (again points the pen at the F1 female floppy-eared parent) got that gene. (Another student intervenes with ‘Hello my fellow partners.’) (pointing at screen; moves pen around the F1 generation box) But each of them has has it in them (moves pen to F2 parents). Then (moves pen around the F1 generation box) when they didn’t and (moves pen to F2 generation box, pointing at floppy-eared rabbits) whatever . you know that’s what it’s called, recessive genes? Well I don’t know that’s what I hear I think ./???/

At this point in their work, the students are still in the process of figuring out what aspects of the information appearing on the computer screen count as a pattern relevant to the task of explaining the inheritance of different ear shapes in the simulated rabbits. G, for instance, links pattern to the two shapes of ears (line 49). B mentions the location of the images of rabbits on the screen in regard to their kinship (line 50) and describes a particular pair of rabbits on the screen. He points at two rabbits separated from the others by a rectangular border, indicating that they are parents of the rows of rabbits appearing in the box directly below them. B misspeaks, saying ‘these two couples’ as he points at the single couple consisting of two rabbits. Then, he points at rabbits in the box directly above the parent rabbits, saying, ‘are from this block right here,’ thus constructing a relationship between generations of rabbits. Next, as he says, ‘So that means their parents . their mom,’ he points at the pair of rabbits at the very top of the screen (that is, the grandparents of the rabbits at which he first pointed). He verbally and gesturally interprets both the layout of the images on the screen and the preceding activity that produced that layout as meaning that the two rabbits at which he first pointed have some relationship to the demarcated sets of rabbits above and below them, and that such information is relevant to discovering a pattern as specified by the printed task prompt. We have evidence here of how B aligns his prior knowledge of pattern to the immediate resources and constraints. In sum, B’s switching between technical and colloquial terminology accompanies his pointing at specific images of rabbits on the screen,




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• developing reciprocity of perspectives with G, with the teacher (as mediated through the task prompt sheet and the configuration of the software), and with the designers of the software (as mediated through the software interface); • constructing with G an accessible format (the ‘normal’ form) for communicating about their work on the task; • making sense of the computer software’s graphical interface as it applies to the immediate task; • applying a retrospective and prospective sense of occurrence in order to accomplish the preceding by drawing on and expressing background knowledge that may be relevant to the task (indexed by shifting between linguistic terms that have task specific or sociocultural implications), or by waiting for ensuing task work to clarify confusing representations; • answering the questions on the task prompt sheet; and • learning about genetic inheritance (which may be a result rather than an explicit motivation in the context of the other work he is doing). B’s search for and expression of pattern (presented verbally and gesturally) functions to help the students develop reciprocity of perspectives about what they are seeing and doing as well as helping them to develop a ‘normal’ form for discussing what they are seeing and doing. Once the students have used basic interpretive procedures to map images, words, and activities to each other semiotically, their ongoing application of interpretive procedures to make sense of their interaction and the learning task is simplified. The interactional interpretive work can then focus on recalling such mappings, rather than constructing them. B’s simultaneous self-correction, by pointing at the screen, of his utterance ‘these two couples’ (line 50) is another instance of the trial and error aspect of interpreting task resources and developing a ‘normal’ form for communicating about the task. The multiple modes of communicating (talking and pointing, in this case) related to linking the screen images provide additional interpretive resources for the participants. While this complicates the interpretive work, it also provides resources for elaborating on vague linguistic concepts, and even provides simultaneous correction of mistakes. In this case, G does not correct or question B’s mistaken utterance, since his pointing has already clarified his intent. Another case of this occurred when G interrupted B’s talking about and pointing at rabbits displayed at a particular part of the screen, which he stated were ‘the F2’s parents’ (line 42). G pointed her pen at those rabbits as she contested B’s utterance by saying, ‘F1’ (line 43).


showing the work he does to conform to what is expected in terms of learning process and outcome. He concurrently works at:


However, B’s minimally elaborated response, ‘No’ (line 44), in conjunction with G’s attention to the particulars of the screen images, resulted in G acknowledging that B was correct and apologizing (line 45). The students’ unspoken procedural knowledge about the task is the ‘normal’ form of pointing and talking that they have developed through such multimodal interaction as a way to interpret and use the visual resources afforded by the computer simulation software. In this case, the social cognitive activities of the students are linked to the immediate task resources. For example, the images produced by using the software prompt students to point at the computer screen. Thus, both pointing and the screen images contribute to accomplishing the task in hand. Ultimately, this leads to an intertwining of students’ understandings of genetic inheritance with the local resources they have applied to constructing those understandings.

Understanding recessive and dominant While dealing with pattern, the students also work on developing and applying concepts of dominant and recessive genes as components of genetic inheritance. B’s comments (lines 54, 58) indicate that he has not yet linked the available information in order to develop an understanding of how the dominant and recessive genes relate to the inheritance of traits: 53. 54.

G: B:

Recessive genes. What the hell does that mean? . . .

58.

B:

that’s what it’s called, recessive genes?

For B, recessive is a placeholder for missing information relevant to developing understanding (Saferstein, 2007).6 G’s utterance, ‘got that gene’ (line 55), indexes the physical characteristics (phenotype) of the rabbit offspring based on observing the computer screen in the context of the students’ developing understandings of the task. By pointing at the screen, G links the linguistic term recessive genes with the images of rabbits having floppy ears. In doing so, she also implies a relationship between genes and traits (‘none of them got that gene,’ line 55), and contributes to a model of dominant and recessive genes and traits. However, like B, G indicates that her understanding of dominant and recessive genes is still incomplete. She demonstrates this confusion in her utterances (lines 55 and 57) and incrementally her pointing becomes less specific as she tries to make sense of and to explain recessive (line 57). The students’ pointing must be considered as a constitutive part of sense-making, not merely as an appended feature of utterances





(Saferstein, 2004). At times the pointing is more specific than the talk in expressing the students’ interpretations of the screen and in contributing to the ‘normal’ form of interaction they develop for completing the learning task. For example, G’s utterances accompany her actions of pointing at the screen. Her pointing and talk inform each other with meaning that neither has independently. G’s utterances, ‘none of them got that gene’ (line 55) and ‘But each of them has has it in them’ (line 57), seem contradictory. Do the rabbits have the gene or not? However, G’s pointing at different screen images as she speaks provides B with more detail about how she is interpreting the information presented by B, the screen, and the task prompt as well as her background knowledge. Responding to B’s question about the meaning of her utterance, ‘Recessive genes’ (line 53), G says, ‘It’s inside you know like,’ and then pauses briefly. This exchange happens while the students are looking at the configuration of the software shown in Row A of Figure 7.6. After her pause, G continues by pointing with her pen at the screen image of the floppy ear of one of the parent rabbits (Row B, Figure 7.6). By pointing, she links the uttered phrase, ‘It’s inside,’ with a representation of the ‘outside’ – the visible physical characteristics – of a specific rabbit. By pointing at a specific image of a floppy ear, she also links recessive gene with floppy ears. The explanatory concept she both develops and communicates through words and gestures is that recessive genes are inside the rabbit and affect the shape of its ears. Next, G points at the rows of rabbits representing the offspring of the parent rabbit at which she has just pointed (Row C, Figure 7.6). The pointing and the utterance, ‘none of them got,’ indicate that she is concerned with the offspring rabbits’ inheritance of something. She clarifies what was inherited by pointing (Row D, Figure 7.6) at the floppy ear of the same parent rabbit at which she had earlier pointed as she says, ‘that gene.’ She does not point at a gene. The screen images do not show genes. As G continues (Row E, Figure 7.6), the developmental aspect of the communication is displayed when both her linguistic and gestural expression become vague. She moves the pen around the various images of rabbits without stopping to point at any particular image. Concurrently, she makes the vague statement, ‘But each of them has has it in them and then when they didn’t whatever . you know.’ She expresses a gap in the information needed to explain the relationship of recessive genes to floppy ears. The images of rabbits that she moves the pen over do not show floppy ears. They show straight ears. G’s utterance, ‘But each of them has has it in them and then,’ begins to construct a description that would link ‘it,’ the offspring’s inheritance of recessive genes


174


(A)

55. G: It’s inside you know like.

(B)

(points pen at floppy ear of F1 female floppy-eared parent) look that one

(C)

(pointing pen in circular motion around the rows of F1 offspring) and none of them got

(D)

(again points at F1 floppy eared parent) that gene.

(E)

57. G: (Pointing at screen; moves pen around the F1 generation box) But each of them has has it in them (moves pen to F2 parents). Then (moves pen around the F1 generation box) when they didn’t and (moves pen to F2 generation box, pointing at floppy-eared rabbits) whatever . you know

Figure 7.6


175

Images, gestures, and talk



from a floppy-eared parent rabbit, with the presence of the recessive genes inside the offspring (‘them’). However, G does not have the words or the screen images to complete the process narrative by expressing what happens next. G’s utterance, ‘And then,’ just leads to the words, ‘when they didn’t whatever . you know,’ concurrent with her aimless pointing at various images on the screen and moving of the pen away from the screen as she says ‘you know.’ The images of rabbits over which G has moved her pen do not have floppy ears. G indicates that these rabbits have the floppy ear gene, but ‘didn’t’ show it. ‘Whatever’ is a placeholder for missing information that would help to explain why the floppy ear gene does not lead to floppy-eared rabbits.

Indexing recessive genes across graphic and linguistic modes of representation As the work session continues, the students expand their understandings of the learning task by mapping terms and concepts to the computer screen images and to each other’s interpretations and understandings expressed through talk and pointing at the screen. In the activity represented by Row A, Figure 7.7, G states, ‘they carry this gene, the dominant’ as she points at the straight ear of the female parent of the F1 generation. ‘Carry’ suggests both a location and the particular rabbit as a container for the dominant gene. The straight ear also indexes the gene. G merges the phenotype and genotype, just as the graphic image does, since the screen does not graphically represent either genes or processes through which genes function to influence the development of physical characteristics. The activities of Row B, Figure 7.7, show that G continues to use gesture directed at the graphics in conjunction with verbal description, ‘but they have recessive genes in these ones,’ to explain why floppy ears appear in the F2 generation. Again, the ear shape indexes both genotype and phenotype by locating the recessive genes in the parents. In is vague about the cellular and biochemical aspects of genes or their functioning. G indexes this vague sense of genes existing and functioning within the rabbits or the ears by shifting from pointing with her index finger to placing her thumb and index finger in a position that suggests placing an object in or withdrawing an object from a container – as if she were going to grab the male F1 parent rabbit’s floppy ear (and analogically, the recessive gene) between her fingers (Row C, Figure 7.7). She does this as she says, ‘that . that trait’ (part of the utterance ‘they have that . that trait in them so I guess they get that one’ (Rows B, C, and D, Figure 7.7).


176


(A)

393. G: No, you know why? Because the they they carry this gene, the dominant,

(B)

but they have recessive genes in these ones so they have.

(C)

that . that trait

(D)

in them so I guess / if they they get that one ?/

Figure 7.7

Reflexivity of gesture, talk, and meaning

Maintaining the grabbing/lifting gesture of her thumb and index finger, G then moves her hand to the image of a straight-eared rabbit in the set of F1 generation offspring below the F1 parents. The gesture and movement suggest taking the recessive (floppy-ear) gene from the parent and placing it within the offspring, as she says, ‘in them’ (Row D). Using the visual resources at hand, G gesturally and linguistically expresses both a concept of recession and the role of recessive genes in the inheritance of traits. The gestural and graphic aspects of G’s communication





are more precise and detailed than her verbal description. By pointing at the screen images, G emphasizes the interrelationship of the graphic resources and the concepts she is forming. The interactional sequence shows the cognitive role of the gesturing and visual resources in creating the memories that comprise knowledge. The limitations of the task resources (such as the computer graphics, which do not show the genes or the biochemical processes) encapsulate the information that the students may remember. Such incompleteness of the graphical representation may also become incompleteness in the genetics concept – constituted through the ‘normal’ form and reciprocity of perspectives the students develop when interpreting those representations. By linking linguistic and graphic representations through gesture – linking a term to various modes of representation – G shows that she has developed an understanding of how to use a part of the genetics discourse, dominant and recessive, that is relevant to the task at hand. However, her use of ‘in’ when she says, ‘each of them has has it in them’ (Row E, Figure 7.6) serves as a placeholder for missing information about genes. The missing information could consist of an explanation of the biochemical processes by which genes affect traits, or – as genetic inheritance is conventionally taught – the missing information that is indicated by G’s ‘whatever’ (Row E, Figure 7.6) could be (re)mediated with a shift to explanatory discourse based on symbols and computational devices that assess patterns of physiological characteristics and predict their appearance in the next generation. Applying the conventions for teaching genetic inheritance, the teacher (T) has designed the learning task to accomplish the latter. Subsequent classroom interaction showed that, through the kind of multimodal communication discussed here, the students become fluent with the empiricist repertoire (Gilbert and Mulkay, 1984) associated with explaining genetic inheritance. However, that fluency is contingent on the representational resources that are present and the ‘normal’ form the students develop for communicating about them as part of their interpretive procedure to mediate and (re)mediate missing information. For example, 12 days later, when the teacher verbally tests them, B and G express an understanding of aspects of recessive genes relevant to explaining the inheritance of traits (Transcript extract 3, lines 706–12).


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Transcript extract 3 706. T: Okay. So what does that tell you about the floppy-eared characteristic? Did it get wiped out/???/


707. 708. 709. 710. 711. 712.

B: G: B: G: T: B:

/No./ /No./ The genes are/still in there./ /still in there/ Okay. So it’s hidden right? Yeah. Yeah. It’s just not as dominant as . . there you go.

B indexes the recessive characteristic, floppy ears, in relation to the dominant characteristic, mentioning that the straight ears are ‘just not as dominant’ (line 712). B uses ‘dominant’ more often than ‘recessive,’ even when he displays that he has learned to correctly complete the assigned tasks. The students’ understanding that ‘the genes are still in there’ (lines 709–10) is contingent on linking the information about the simulation indexed by the teacher’s mention of the particulars of the computer simulation which are present, that is, ‘a floppy-eared characteristic’ that did not ‘get wiped out’ (line 706). ‘Did not get wiped out’ indexes the appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of floppy ears across three generations of rabbits represented as boxed sets of rows on the screen. Thus, B’s use of the empiricist repertoire of genetics terms – when he says he understands that ‘The genes are still in there’ and the floppy ear gene ‘is just not as dominant’ (lines 709, 712) as the straight ear gene – is linked to the local resources and related activities of interpretation. He does not present a globally applicable model of the functioning of genes inside cells that would explain their categorization as dominant or recessive (‘less dominant’).

Discussion and conclusion Our analysis of semiotic (re)mediation reveals the extent to which students or exhibition visitors must work to access the interpretive frameworks that designers of software or exhibits create to represent scientific concepts. The genetic inheritance exhibit shows the complex multiple modes of representation that viewers must interpret and link in order to develop memorable understandings of the relevant concepts. The students’ use of pictorial and textual resources to develop interpretations and understandings of pattern, dominant genes, and recessive genes shows both the complexity of the learning process and how the constraints designed into learning resources prompt interactional work to manage both the use and the interpretation of those resources. Such resources do not contribute to understanding simply by presenting new information. Rather, understanding derives from the inferences





they prompt users to make in order to link pieces of information. Analysis of students working with textual and computer resources shows that such inferences are not based simply on rules of formal logic, but on the same basic interpretive procedures that people use to make sense of face-to-face and mediated interaction, including trial and error in formulating and expressing coherent explanations (such as the students’ mistakes and corrections) and using multiple forms of expression (such as the students’ pointing and talking). The students apply basic interpretive procedures not only to their interaction with each other, but also to their interaction with computer resources that simulate examples of genetic inheritance. At issue for educators is what people learn from classroom curricula or public exhibits, and why people do or do not learn it. For instance, the interactive wheel in the educational exhibit (Figure 7.3) is vague in its relation to actual biological processes. Does the wheel-turning index sexual relations, eggs and sperm combining, cell division, all of these, or none of them? It is a heuristic model that substitutes for information about how genes affect traits, and suggests that the changing location of genes has something to do with that influence. However, like the computer simulation of generations of rabbits in our classroom data, it leaves out the biochemical processes through which genes affect traits. As a result, although users may develop clear understandings of how to operate multimodal educational devices, the biological processes indexed by such devices are not clear or even represented. In order to interpret the relationship between the multiple forms of representation, users must also interpret and understand how to operate an educational display or classroom resource. Paradoxically, this ordinary and necessary cognitive activity takes time and attention away from the interpretive work related to substantive understanding. Furthermore, the social and organizational constraints that influence use of educational resources may cause users to attend to the multimodal forms of representation differently than designers or teachers anticipate. Thus, in actual use, multiple modes of representation designed into educational resources may complicate rather than clarify meanings and concepts. In light of our analysis, it is worthwhile revisiting the dichotomous categories of declarative and procedural knowledge (Brown and Duguid, 2000; Polanyi, 1958, 1967) or episodic and semantic memory (Medved and Oatley, 2000) to explain such interpretive activities and their sociocognitive consequences. The biology students’ unspoken interpretations of how to use a software interface can be considered as examples of procedural (tacit) knowledge and contrasted with their


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verbal explanations of the software and the genetics information, which fit the category of declarative knowledge. The students’ recall and expression of the procedures for using the software to answer a task question can be considered as episodic memory and contrasted with their semantic memory, exemplified by their recall and expression of interpretations of dominant and recessive genes. However, while such categorizations may help us to recognize different types of understandings or different expressions of understandings, they do not account for the ways that people combine linguistic and nonlinguistic communication with multiple modes of representation when developing understandings that they can recall and apply. Such categorical distinctions present a perspective that focuses on the role of linguistic expression as a form of communication related to developing and recalling understandings. However, as our analysis of the classroom learning interaction shows, the absence of linguistic expression or of clear linguistic expression does not mean that participants fail to communicate useful interpretations of information, including information about the procedures for using the educational resources. Rather, participants declare interpretations and understandings of visual resources (that is, communicate them in an accessible way) by pointing at, gesturing toward, or using those resources to demonstrate interpretations and understandings. Information and interpretations that the students expressed declaratively during the early discussion of task resources (for example, the significance of the arrangement of the images of rabbits) are subsequently noted by gesturing and pointing. Furthermore, the routine (‘normal’) form of pointing at the screen to explicate interpretations expresses knowledge declaratively but not linguistically. In this regard, procedural and declarative knowledge are not different cognitive domains, but are aspects of the mediated interaction and resources required to accomplish tasks. In the same vein, Medved and Oatley’s (2000) distinction between episodic and semantic memory in relation to museum exhibits can be reconsidered in terms of how people manage social cognitive activities. People observed using the genetics exhibit viewed it individually and briefly. Maneuvering through a public venue and around a particular exhibit reduces the time people have to engage in the interpretive procedures and to focus on the semiotic (re)mediation that are central to the type of interpretive work evident in the classroom data presented above. Considered in this context, Medved and Oatley’s findings reflect the environmental limitations on opportunities to engage in the interpretive activities needed to develop recallable understandings,





rather than the processing of information as different forms of memory. The categorical distinctions of episodic/semantic memory and declarative/procedural knowledge may elide the complex of interpretive activities linked to particular settings and resources, which lead to understandings. Study of how people develop multimodal forms of expression in order to interpret and link information presented through various modes of representation leads to an ecologically valid model of understanding. It also explicates the relationship of interpretive interaction to the authority of professional and institutional cultures. Educational resources incorporate professional conventions, which influence routine interpretive interaction and the resulting understandings (or nonunderstandings) of science. The conventions of professional cultures and the constraints of the institutional settings related to science education affect both the forms of representation (for example, neglecting information about cellular processes by which genes affect traits) and the attendant interpretive activities. The contingencies that affected Mendel’s research, such as the absence of technologies for viewing genes and the related absence of theoretical models explaining the functioning of genes, do not affect current genetic research and theory. Yet, despite an increase in the amount of relevant scientific information about genes and genomics that could contribute to different approaches to explaining and teaching the topic, educational institutions continue to present traditional empirical models of genetic inheritance based on Mendel’s approach. As a result, the interpretive work of shifting among and linking heuristic devices across multiple modes of representation to form an abstract model of genetic inheritance counts as understanding. However, this may not lead to understandings that people can recall or apply in other settings lacking the representational resources of a classroom or display (Saferstein 2007, forthcoming). Examining the particulars and consequences of such cultural reproduction also shows where changes can be made to curricula and educational resources so that the interpretive activities of learning, including semiotic (re)mediation, can lead to transferable understandings, rather than just reproducing situated knowledge. Since the role of genetics and genomics is expanding in regard to medical diagnosis and treatment and to public health care initiatives, individuals will benefit from explanations and understandings for which recall is not dependent on placeholders for missing information, such as those encountered in classrooms and public education venues. For example, curricula and exhibits that do not link users’ interpretive activities only to the


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traditional Mendelian representational resources, but also incorporate information about the cellular processes by which genes affect the development of traits could lead to understandings that better transfer to medical settings and health care decisions where knowledge of genetic inheritance applies.

Notes 1. The use of multiple modes of representation is common in exhibits intended to educate about genetic inheritance. For example, many of the themes and approaches to representing them were also present during the same time period as the exhibit discussed here in a much larger traveling exhibit, Genome, featuring multiple displays, sponsored by Pfizer and produced by Clear Channel Exhibitions (http://genome.pfizer.com). 2. We would like to thank Angela Burgess, Education Officer, The Wales Gene Park, for permission to present photos of the genetic inheritance exhibit. 3. While the example of eye color is commonly used in classrooms and educational displays in basic explanations of genetic inheritance, it is purely heuristic, since human eye color is a multigene trait, and is not controlled by one set of genes as the example suggests. 4. The data were recorded in a California High School biology class, as part of the Community of Explorers Project (National Science Foundation RED-9154815). They are part of the first author’s ongoing research on genetics education, and are representative examples of what continues to be the conventional model for explaining genetic inheritance in classrooms and educational exhibits in the US and UK. 5. Key to transcriptions: /two words/ Words between slashes overlap words between slashes for following speaker. . Each period represents a pause of .5 seconds or less. (?) Each question mark within parentheses indicates one unclear word. (laughs) Words inside parentheses represent the analyst’s descriptions of sounds or actions. 6. As an application of the prospective sense of occurrence, such placeholders or gray boxes, which have no substantive meaning in regard to the other information at hand, help participants to sustain interaction and to use certain resources in a particular setting. However, they are problematic in regard to recalling the information linked to them in different settings that do not contain those resources (Saferstein, 2007, forthcoming).




Citizens Doing Science in Public Spaces: Rhetorical Invention, Semiotic Remediation, and Simple Little Texts Jeffrey T. Grabill Michigan State University

and Stuart Blythe Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne

In this chapter, we explore relationships between two issues. The first is the place of semiotic remediation in the discursive work of a community environmental organization. More specifically, we are interested in describing this organization’s inventional work as it attempted to influence the public discourse of an environmental problem in their community. The second issue is the role of rhetorical activity in the formation and maintenance of organizations themselves, which is a part of a larger chain of agencies required to make and maintain issues of public concern. We understand our work to be concerned with problems of public rhetoric more generally and risk communication more particularly. By ‘public rhetoric,’ we are referring to work in rhetorical theory explicitly concerned with the definition and function of a public in relation to issues of concern (for example, Ackerman and Coogan, forthcoming; Asen and Brouwer, 2001; Banning, 2005). What is meant by public and what counts as a public issue is complex. It is not unreasonable to suggest that these problems are central to the enterprise of rhetorical inquiry and theory itself. Public typically refers to either a forum of deliberation (such as a publication or venue like a legislature) or those groups and individuals who can speak and write in that forum. Or public refers to both. What counts as a public issue of concern can be a matter


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of philosophical debate (‘What are proper public issues?’) or rhetorical pragmatism (‘What can we make a public issue?’). Risk communication, which describes the communicative complexities attached to public risk, is in many ways a more precise example of what public rhetoric looks like, but risk communication is an area of practice for scholars and practitioners with wide-ranging interests, concerns, and training (for example, Grabill and Simmons, 1998; Mirel, 1994; Sauer, 2003). In both cases, we focus on the actual work required to do rhetoric in the complex contemporary places we all inhabit. Clearly, then, one problem with conceptualizing and engaging in public rhetoric is understanding locations, boundaries, and actors. We are required to ask questions like what the public is, where the places are in which it (we?) can be located, and who we are together when we are doing rhetoric. We will not take up these issues explicitly in this chapter, but these questions may be useful background for what we do address. What we will claim is that the complex and distributed scenes in which public rhetoric must happen require semiotic remediation practices and an understanding of invention as one way that groups are assembled. We base this claim on the results of our three years of work in a community we call Harbor, a community faced with the unpleasant need to do something about a heavily polluted waterway and a community in which it is possible to see semiotic remediation practices as both a way to understand an environmental problem and a way to build coalitions for greater awareness and power. We borrow the term semiotic remediation practices from Prior, Hengst, Roozen, and Shipka (2006), who explain that they chose semiotic over multimodal because they want to avoid, or perhaps downplay, the concept of modes (such as text, image, and sound). They worry that the concept of mode ‘is yet to be settled and may suggest exclusions (e.g., mode as opposed to medium)’ (p. 740). They chose semiotic because they are ‘interest[ed] in signs across modes, media, channels, and so on’ (p. 740). And they chose remediation because they are interested in ways that content is recontextualized (repurposed) in new situations. By choosing remediation, Prior et al. (2006) draw on the work of Bolter and Grusin (1999), for whom the term refers to ‘the representation of one medium in another’ (p. 45). For example, many of Jane Austen’s novels (such as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma) have been retold as films. And many biblical stories have been presented in paintings. In cases such as these, ‘The content has been borrowed, but the medium has not been appropriated or quoted’ (Bolter and Grusin, 1999, p. 44). In Harbor, we sometimes read passages of text in summaries or


Jeffrey T. Grabill and Stuart Blythe 185



fliers – text that we had originally heard as talk at a meeting and vice versa. By using the term ‘semiotic’ in order to downplay Bolter and Grusin’s emphasis on media, Prior et al. emphasize the ways that signs are repurposed in various settings, not exclusively from one medium to another. Remediation for Prior et al. can even include the act of writing down a memory. They cite Vygotsky’s (1987) example of remembering a barefoot boy in a blue shirt running down the street. Although a person can recall such a memory with all elements (boy, barefoot, blue shirt, and so on) present simultaneously, the memory must be remediated in print, which is linear and forces the writer to present each image one at a time. Finally, Prior et al. (2006) add the word ‘practice’ in order to emphasize that semiotic remediations are discourse events that draw on cultural resources while simultaneously creating culture, a process which the authors call ‘sociogenesis (the people- and society-making dimensions of activity)’ (p. 740): Semiotic remediation practice then is a notion that draws together diverse phenomena around a basic set of semiotic operations and that is attuned to the situated and sociogenetic dimensions of everyday activity and discourse. It aims to reach from the fleeting worlds of inner semiosis to long, historical chains of material activity in the world. (p. 743) By adopting Prior et al.’s terminology, we can explore the ways that citizens in Harbor used various semiotic operations not only to understand an environmental problem and argue for a particular response but also to build and maintain the networks necessary to establish that understanding and to put forward a viable agenda for addressing a public problem. Thus, group formation, our second issue, is also central to our analysis here. Similar to what others are calling sociogenesis, we explore what discourse can help make, but we are less sure, given our data, of the strength of any people/society making claims. As we discuss sociogenetic issues, we will use another language, one that refers instead to gatherings, assemblies, and groups. In this regard, we take as our starting place for understanding the relationships between rhetorical activity and groupness the recent work of Bruno Latour (2005) because of Latour’s methodological usefulness. Latour is methodologically interesting to the


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study of rhetoric because his approach to the study of the social is analogically productive for thinking about how to study the rhetorical. For instance, in Latour’s (2005) most recent and explicit treatment of what is commonly known as actor–network theory, he writes that with normative social science – what he calls the sociology of the social – the concept of the social is asserted to exist and given, depending on the sociology, certain defining characteristics. Such sociologists then use the social to explain other activity. In contrast, Latour argues that the social is not a domain or realm but a ‘very peculiar movement of reassociation and reassembling’ (p. 7). Instead of using the social as a way to examine other phenomena, Latour says the social is the phenomenon to be examined. In like fashion, we suggest that the rhetorical – or what counts as rhetoric – must also be assembled. We are exploring the extent to which rhetoric can best be understood by examining particular kinds of associative activity. According to this view, it is the work of rhetoric to help individuals gather – assemble – and care for these gatherings. The rhetor – which is more often than not a collective of some sort – must assemble what we might call the scene of rhetoric – the collection of human and nonhuman actors performing the rhetorical work of creating agencies. These agencies are (and lead to other) documents, messages, performances, and events, but they also refer to more abstract exigencies (that is, matters of concern) that constitute the reasons for writing and that motivate action. Our claim here runs contrary to some commonplace views in rhetorical theory, which hold to the notion, either explicitly or implicitly, that speakers and writers (rhetors) are individuals who move other individuals or groups to action through their speaking or writing. We believe this view to be both descriptively and conceptually inaccurate. It is assemblies that achieve rhetorical aims. Rhetorical assemblies are highly variable things, and yes, they certainly are driven by individuals working in concert to achieve their aims, but assemblies are also made of other things as well. Things to be gathered include many of the types of things noted above, but also include the infrastructures necessary to support rhetorical activity (Grabill, 2007). Assemblies are kinetic, and they exist for as long as they continue to move others to act – to write, to speak, to move, to change their minds. We adopt this actor–network approach to rhetoric in our analysis. Relying on the same meetings and documents that we will use to render an account of semiotic remediation practices, we will also attempt to show how these activities help gather together the very organization that produces these documents, and through this




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process, helps to (re)create the very public issue – a dredging project – that is the issue of public concern in this community.

This chapter emerges from our work on an action research project in a town we call Harbor. (For a more detailed description of this project, see Blythe, Grabill, and Riley, 2008.) Along with Kirk Riley, we worked from 2003 to 2006 on behalf of a group called Technical Outreach Services for Communities (TOSC), which is headquartered at Michigan State University. TOSC got involved in the Harbor project through an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant to review the plans for dredging a canal and storing the sediment within city limits.1 Because the canal is one of the most heavily polluted waterways in the country, because it contains developmental toxins, and because the sediments were to be stored approximately 800 yards from two schools, significant numbers of citizens questioned or opposed the project. They expressed worries about health effects (for example, breathing contaminated, airborne particles) and also about the economic impact of having what would essentially be a landfill located in their city. TOSC brought together third-party experts (professors with experience in dredging, measuring air quality, and constructing landfills) who could review the Corps’s plans and, through written reports and presentations at public meetings, offer their expertise and judgment to the community. We were brought in because Riley felt that the political situation was particularly complex and that good communication between groups would be central. We were brought in, in other words, as communication experts. We spent most of our first year meeting with local residents, journalists, government employees, and members of environmental groups. We conducted interviews in offices, libraries, and in people’s homes, and we attended several meetings per year of a local environmental group, the CEC.2 (The CEC is a not-for-profit group that focuses primarily on environmental issues but also on local politics.) As we developed a clearer picture of how citizens understood the problems in Harbor and communicated their understanding to one another, we reported to Riley, who used that information to shape the kinds of advice he gave the subject matter experts regarding audience expectations. We also used our evolving sense of the situation when we helped edit reports or organize meetings at which TOSC discussed its findings with the community. Our work often brought us into contact with the same people in different settings or with individual members of a loose network of citizen


Background: the dredging project in Harbor


activists. In addition to advising TOSC regarding their public communication, we took part in many informal discussions during our three-year project. We also conducted nine formal interviews and attended three public meetings sponsored by TOSC, six meetings of the CEC, five meetings of the municipal body charged with managing the city’s waterways, and three conference calls between TOSC, its third-party experts, and representatives of the CEC, Army Corps of Engineers, and EPA. We took written notes during all formal observations and interviews. As a result, we often saw the same texts being used in different settings. During an informal conversation with the secretary of a neighborhood association, for example, we heard her make arguments against the project that were nearly identical to arguments made by members of the CEC. By seeing how texts circulated, we were able to gain a better understanding of the ways that semiotic practices were remediated from situation to situation. The most fruitful examples of such remediation, in our experience, occurred during meetings of the CEC.

Meetings as inventional spaces The CEC, which was the focus in our study, is a loose collection of individuals, some with college degrees, some with degrees in relevant scientific disciplines, but most with neither. About 20 individuals usually attended organizational meetings. The CEC met once a month (at least ten meetings per year) in a basement room of a local public library. One of the key dynamics that characterized the rhetorical work of the CEC organization in particular was the common movement of work across semiotic modes (for example, from text to talk, back to text, and so on). As is illustrated in Figure 8.1, an individual at a CEC meeting (circle 1) may tell others about something she heard relating to the dredging project. The group may then discuss that issue for a while. Eventually, another person in the group may do some research and write a brief summary of an article mentioned by the first person (circle 3), while another person from the group may speak about what he learned at the meeting with an acquaintance (circle 2). The written summary may be shared and discussed at the next CEC meeting (circle 5). Also, the acquaintance from circle 2 may have document design skills and may work with the writer of the summary to create a highly visual flier, or perhaps a web page, in order to spread the information further (circle 4) and so on. A second key dynamic was the role of groups in this mediating activity. To illustrate these remediations later in the chapter, we use the




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4 2

3

5

Individual speaking/ listening

Individual writing alphanumeric text

Individual reading alphanumeric text

Individual writing multimedia text

Individual reading multimedia text Rhetorical situation Figure 8.1 A conceptual diagram of semiotic remediation

examples of two texts, but in order to understand where texts came from in this community and particularly with this particular organization, it is essential to understand their meetings as moments of invention. By invention, we refer to activities such as defining a rhetorical situation, generating ideas for understanding and addressing that situation, interpreting texts relevant to the situation, and exploring options for presenting those ideas to others. By saying that CEC meetings were moments of invention, we subscribe to LeFevre’s (1986) claim that invention can be a social act, something that can occur as a result of dialog between various participants as well as an individual’s interaction with other texts (see also Lauer, 2004). CEC meetings often served inventional purposes through the informal, collaborative structure of each event. The typical pattern of the meeting, which almost never had a written agenda, was an iterative cycle of report and discussion (something like one would see in circle 5 of Figure 8.1), with new work assignments sometimes taken on or assigned at the end. As the key place that the organization invented knowledge in a clearly coordinated way, the CEC had a common process. At the beginning, members attending the meeting were asked if they knew anything about the issues of concern to the group, which


1


always was the dredging project in general but often more specific issues related to the project or to local politics. Members would also offer spoken, impromptu summaries of texts read elsewhere (as in circle 1 of Figure 8.1), or, less often, their own written summaries of texts (as in circle 5), photocopies of articles or graphics, or accounts of first-hand observation in the community. In this way, members identified possible topics for future communication (such as fliers, phone calls, or statements at public meetings). To illustrate more clearly how members shared information, we offer a typical example from Stuart’s fieldnotes: At about 2:20, R said she had looked for the article on environmental cleanup in Canada. (This article had been mentioned at the meeting in January.) She said she couldn’t find it and asked if others knew how to find it. B said that everyone should look for information that would be good for leaflets. She said the group should make leaflets. (As has happened at previous meetings, B made the suggestion but did not follow up. No one was assigned such a task.) This example is typical in a number of ways. First is the fact that reporting as an activity was primarily an oral practice for this organization, even though it was often grounded in extensive reading before the meeting. CEC meetings were commonly marked by reports, all of them delivered orally (occasionally with an accompanying written text distributed to members of the group, but usually with no text apparent at all). Ideas from those oral reports, both content (for example, statistics) and strategies (for example, how to organize for an upcoming meeting), were modified, added to, and otherwise altered in the meeting. Second is B’s tasking practice. It was also common for B – or someone else – to announce that ‘everyone’ should find information on a topic or subject. Sometimes this happened, sometimes not. At times, B would also leave a task assignment hanging, in this case, the call to make leaflets. Yet, as we know, sometimes leaflets and other sorts of simple little texts got made, and a substantive part of their fabrication process occurred during these meetings, which served as occasions for ideas to be moved from talk to text – and back again. This process is complex, and given the focus of our study, we did not attempt to account for it in detail. Given the complexity of the process, there was nothing simple about these little texts. As we progressed through our study and edited analytical reports on the science and engineering of the





project (and read many others), we were struck by our own comparisons between ‘expert-produced’ texts that most people would assume to be complex and ‘nonexpert’ produced texts that most would assume to be unsophisticated. When we told other people about our work in Harbor, we often heard a response like this: ‘You must really have to make sure that the information is simple enough for citizens to read.’ That was rarely the problem. (What we had to ensure was that experts framed the problem in ways meaningful to citizens.) Although ‘nonexpert’ texts were usually shorter and lacked the formatting that would mark them as a large-scale expert report, the information presented in those texts was often clearly reasoned and persuasive. Thus, relatively powerless groups like the CEC were able to exercise disproportionate power in this situation via, at least in part, what they wrote. But for our purposes here, the irony in our use of the word ‘simple’ refers to the fact that the mode of construction for these texts was invisible and the complexity masked, and this fact enables experts and other lay people who have not read the work produced by the CEC to mischaracterize as simple. Our summary of these inventional activities still masks significant complexity in the making of these documents, of course, but it suggests some important issues. The first is that the rhetor in this process is not an individual. The inventional practices and communication activities that we observed in Harbor were the acts of groups. The analytical decision to focus on groups came late in the study largely because of what we were seeing in the data. Analytically, our move was initially to notice and account for the distributed and coordinated nature of activity as we observed it within the CEC group. This need to account for groupness and agencies is the rationale for our use of Latour for analytical assistance. We do not want to say that activities of individuals are unimportant. As we discovered when analyzing our fieldnotes, for instance, most members were careful and systematic readers, citing relevant public documents and a wide range of newspapers, magazines, and select scientific journals (for example, Nature). Some citizens told us they read abstracts and summaries of such periodicals and reports. Others said they would go immediately to footnotes, references, and data sets. And sometimes members of the CEC would identify and contact outside expertise. (As B told us once, ‘We couldn’t do anything with what we know.’) Others said they were capable of mining databases available over networks originating in places like the state capitol. They also showed us databases that


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they maintained themselves, such as financial records related to the city of Harbor. In addition to reading, the report of CEC members during the meetings revealed that they actively monitored things like sewage discharge, and two members conducted a neighborhood epidemiological survey (a door-to-door survey in which the members asked residents if they or any family member had or had had cancer). Taken together, these individual efforts contributed the kind of distributed reading and research practices that have been documented within more commonly identified knowledge organizations in which information in itself, or ways of handling that information, becomes the primary commodity (Gonzalez and Mark, 2004; Hart-Davidson, Spinuzzi, and Zachry, 2006). The contributions of individuals were undeniable, but no one person in the CEC knew enough, or had enough power, to offer a sufficient understanding of the situation or what to do about it. The individuals to whom we paid attention needed the assistance of machines, networks, texts, other people, and so on. So all activity required varying levels of cooperation, coordination, or collaboration. Individual activity was important in terms of its function within groups and chains of agencies. Let us try to illustrate more carefully the distributed activity of the meeting (see Figure 8.2). Each box and corresponding letter represents an individual in the organization, their area of expertise, and the most visible interactions between them (that is, who seemed to work with whom). As we have mentioned, the reporting at meetings sometimes F Environment

G Chemistry, regulation

B Chair; principal scientist and writer

A Property values Documents to other community organizations

K Communication consultant

Questions to outside experts found through research

C Cochair; TV show; organizer; “political” research



X Internet work To resources and people in state capitol

Figure 8.2 A diagram of the relationships between, and primary concerns of, seven members (A, B, C, F, G, K, X) of the CEC



triggered discussion and some organizing and action items. But as the figure also shows, there are individuals in the organization who have their own specialties. The key member of the CEC is B. When we first asked her how she attempted to gain the scientific knowledge necessary to take an informed stand in the environmental issues (that is, how she ‘did science’), her answer was that she reads.3 But it is not quite that simple. B does not have reliable Internet access, nor does she use a computer very well. Her reading is largely newspaper, magazine, and journal based, yet she manages, often with the help of others, to get her hands on a number of government and organizational reports from online sources. She also routinely corresponds with a number of people around the country, some of whom are academics and other people playing similar roles in their own environmental organizations and in their own communities. This reading and research she shares with others either through her own typewritten summaries or through talk during CEC meetings. Other individuals in the organization and in her family do networked-based searching and reading, and people help B with whatever computer-based work she needs done (such as typing up the issue summary discussed later). Thus, citizens in Harbor do science by sharing their own firsthand observations, readings, and data gathering and by making sense of these sources through continued discussion and writing. Supported by the reading, observation, and talk shared by people in the CEC, ideas were often transformed in the meeting and then either left inside that meeting room or, in the case of documents like issue summaries or fliers, textualized in some way based on that meeting (either in terms of content or strategy or both). In addition, decisions were made during meetings regarding whether to publish, whether to make the commitment to go public with information. For the CEC, the decision to go public was not taken lightly. Our fieldnotes are replete with discussions of communication strategy, including considerations of content, audience, and timing. Consider the following extract from Stuart’s fieldnotes, where a discussion in CEC’s meeting


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prompted B to cite another study that she had read regarding chromosome damage in newborn babies born in a coal mining district in England. The study suggested that pollutants were causing immediate damage in small children. G said, ‘Let’s get that out.’ He suggested handbills. S remembered a fact sheet that B had produced. A said that such a fact sheet should be revised. This time, though, the sheet



Here we see some of what we discussed earlier: an oral summary of a written report that becomes modified (potentially) for reinscription (possibly) in a new text. In this excerpt, however, we see a more explicit strategic conversation, both about the need to communicate and an approach to the communication (‘hard-hitting’). We see references as well to genres, one genre that we never saw in the time we were in this community (a handbill) and another genre that we saw frequently – the fact sheet or issue summary. In short, the CEC has developed strategies for invention and distribution that are quite complex and also difficult to manage, track, and execute effectively but that commonly and consciously result in texts such as issue summaries and fliers. The invention strategies in particular required complex remediations from textual (and other) modes to talk and then (sometimes) back to text. This remediating practice was driven by an organizational norm for the practice and use of the meeting. While some participants took notes, CEC meetings were largely oral affairs. Reporting was a common rhetorical act, yet it was exclusively oral. That is, given the limits of our data collection (we did not collect artifacts not generally distributed at meetings), we saw reports delivered orally and never in writing. Although individuals sometimes brought photocopies of articles for their own reference, no textual reports were passed around for reference in the meeting or for reading after a meeting. This primarily oral practice required remediating practices prior to the meeting, in the meeting, and when the decision was made to publish and distribute what was reported in the meeting. CEC’s distribution practices also utilized this mixture of talk and text. CEC created and utilized a phone tree for communication, and they also distributed summaries and issue papers to individuals and other organizations. They were always present and vocal in public meetings. That is, this organization understood the effective delivery networks within the community and used them. This discussion of the organizational meeting as inventional space is intended as background for our discussion of two particular documents. But it is more than background. The meeting is a critical moment and place in larger chains of semiotic remediation practices. To illustrate further, we begin with a document called an issue summary and then move to a well-known document that was known as the ‘bullseye flier’.


should be ‘something hard-hitting.’ A implied that the previous fact sheet was too dry. She suggested that references to babies be added.


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The CEC occasionally produced short (roughly four-page) documents in which the organization, with B as a lead writer, annotated the chemicals and chemical compounds found in the waterway, followed by a summary. (These reports were not produced according to any regular schedule, but as changes warranted.) An issue report from June of 2005, for example, notes that, of the 32 compounds listed as important for the Harbor dredging project by the Corps and EPA, the CEC now has information on 22 of them. Of the 22 chemicals and compounds researched, the CEC notes that 10 are considered developmental toxicants, 7 carcinogenic, and 8 reproductive toxicants. Developmental impacts and environmental contributors to childhood disease are particularly important to the CEC for two reasons. One is their fears for the children in the community. The second is related and signals a deep intellectual disagreement with the risk assessment that had been conducted by EPA – in which chemical risks were assessed on the assumption of a ‘healthy adult male’ model.4 With respect to the focus of this chapter, we want to connect a document like the June 2005 issue report to the talk that characterizes the primary (visible) inventive moments of the CEC organization, which we described in our previous section. We know from B’s comments at a public meeting, for instance, that some of the inquiry work that resulted in the issue report was a function of her review of an EPA listing of toxic substances believed to be in the canal sediments. B also told us that her report typically consisted of looking up these substances in well-known and reliable sources such as the toxic substances registry maintained by the US federal government and that her work was bolstered, at least indirectly, by talks with the director of an environmental protection department in a nearby town. It also might have been influenced, to some degree, by whoever typeset the June 2005 report for her (especially if it was K, since he was the author of the bullseye flier). We know that B only used a typewriter, so we wonder about who helped her produce the final version. Such issue reports were used internally to spark discussion among CEC members, and externally to be shared with groups sympathetic to the CEC as well as government employees and politicians – some sympathetic, some not. Thus, the reports served persuasive and informative purposes. Most obviously, they were meant to educate fellow citizens about the risk they may face as a result of the Corps’s and EPA’s actions.


Issue reports


They were, in other words, a basic way that many individuals in Harbor learned about scientific and technical issues related to the dredging project. In CEC meetings, the reports served as the basis for an oral report by B as she informed colleagues of her latest understanding of conditions in the canal. CEC members were then encouraged to share the reports with others or to use the data when questioning government representatives at public meetings. The summaries also served a persuasive purpose. By informing citizens of the toxicants that may be released into the water and atmosphere during the dredging, the CEC hoped to increase opposition to the project. Because citizens often questioned the worth of government plans, the data from the report were used to support their assertions. Perhaps less obviously, the summaries also served a sociogenetic purpose. Because the knowledge represented in the summary was gathered through a network of individuals, and because the summary is most often distributed from hand to hand, it builds and sustains connections between people in the community – a critical issue that we will take up in the conclusion.

The bullseye flier Although many examples of semiotic remediation in Harbor in 2003–5 were necessarily low-tech (for example, word-of-mouth to print, or print to print) because of the relative lack of digital technology in the area, we did hear of or see a few cases where relatively complex technologies were used. For example, one of the members of the CEC conducted a weekly talk show on a local cable access television channel (plans for the show were sometimes discussed in the organization’s meeting). She used the show in part as a forum for airing citizens’ grievances against local politicians. Another local environmental group used a simple website to promote its agenda and meetings.5 One of the most compelling cases we saw of remediation using digital technologies was what locals call ‘the bullseye flier.’ We heard people refer to this flier several times during our visits to Harbor. And we sometimes observed B distributing it (as well as issue summaries) to people who attended CEC meetings for the first time. (B was also sure to get the newcomers’ names, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses.) At one CEC meeting in which members brainstormed ways to publicize what they saw as threats posed by the dredging project to air quality in the city, a member said the group needed a new version of the bullseye flier because the original had been so successful. The group talked about types of images that might be used in the new flier. Because of the ubiquity of the flier and the frequency with which others





referred to it, we consider it to be one of the more influential texts we encountered in Harbor. The flier gained its influence in part because it displayed a significantly high level of attention to visual impact and document production. For one thing, the flier was typeset, which was possible because K, a freelance journalist and friend of many members of the CEC, had the experience and resources to do so. When we spoke to him about the flier, he emphasized how he saw it as his form of community action. ‘I’m not an activist,’ he claimed during an interview. Because he is ‘shy’ with big groups, K likes to get involved through his reporting. He says that what he does well is distill information and put it in front of people in effective ways, much like B. K provides information that groups need, or he helps with presenting the information they have already gathered. Thus, the flier was an ideal way for K to contribute. As Figures 8.3 and 8.4 show, the flier is a two-page document intended to be printed front-to-back on a single sheet. On the front page is an image that K created by designing what looks like a target with a skull and crossbones at the center (thus, what CEC members called ‘the bullseye’).6 This image hovers over a map showing a portion of Harbor, with the skull and crossbones placed over the proposed site of the confined disposal facility (CDF). Along the right column of the front page is a list of facts gathered by the CEC through the kinds of exchanges and issue reports we have mentioned previously. The facts include the proximity of the CDF to two local schools, the types of toxins likely to be stored in the CDF, and the known health effects of those toxins. Dominated as it is by the target and a provocative headline, the front page of the flier is intended primarily to call people’s attention to the problem and its location within their city. Whereas the front page is dominated by a provocative headline and image, the opposite page (Figure 8.4) looks more like a newspaper, with headlines, two ‘articles,’ and a column listing ways to gather more information. It even begins with a dateline. This second page relies more heavily on text than the first. The second page includes a more detailed description of the problem – ‘serious flaws’ in the EPA’s risk assessment and choice of CDF site – a history of the canal and previous dredging projects, and a description of proposed plans for the current dredging project. The second page also contains a column running along the left side of the page. In that column are contact information for federal, state, and local agencies, URLs for a few websites, and a short description of the group that sponsored the flier.


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Figure 8.3 Page one of the bullseye flier (Note that some text has been masked to limit the identifiability of participants, individuals, and organizations.)



The design of the flier itself represents K’s assumptions about the role a flier should play in the spread of information and about how audiences are most likely to receive such information. In our interview, K said he believes that information regarding environmental issues should be kept short and visuals should be used, hence the image-heavy design



Figure 8.4 Page two of the bullseye flier (Note that some text has been masked to limit the identifiability of participants, individuals, and organizations.)


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of the first page. He also said that people would not attend to data distributed by people they mistrust – a claim that was repeated often in this community, both by officials and residents. One aspect that can help gain trust, K said, was the look of a document. If it is typeset, like the bullseye flier, ‘It will look like it has truth to it.’7 K also said that


printed fliers are a good medium for Harbor because the town lacks significant local television, and the area newspapers rarely follow up on a story. Local journalists may cover the initial story or event, K said, but the story never has any depth, and it is also never possible for readers to follow a story over time. The news will get reported, but it will not become a story. To enact his assumptions about the ways an audience accepts information, K made several remediations. Most obviously, he used the familiar, iconic images of the target and skull and crossbones in order to emphasize the threat posed by the project. He also used a map of the city to emphasize the location of the threat. His design works efficiently, telling his readers in one image (1) that a threat exists, (2) what type of threat it is – that is, poisonous – and (3) where it is located in their community. For those willing to read further, K also drew on the genre of the newspaper to complete the second page. In other words, he used a multicolumn format, complete with headlines and datelines, in order to invoke in readers the sense of trust that might attend a reputable newspaper using similar visual conventions. The flier also remediates the map itself. We believe that the bullseye flier presents several maps of the community. It obviously presents a spatial map through the image on the front page. By using a map of the city, K invokes a geographical sense of the social – people in a shared space. By using the skull and crossbones, he uses an image routinely associated with chemical poisons, visually invoking a sense of dangerous contamination in that space. The concentric rings not only invoke a sense of a bullseye, with some unseen force aiming for the community, but also the sense of ripples, with waves of pollutants extending out from the CDF into the community. So the rings can convey a centripetal and centrifugal sense simultaneously. In addition to the community as shared space, the flier is designed to present the community as a collection of concerned groups, something K achieved by presenting references (addresses and phone numbers) to local groups and resources. He also reinforced a widely shared sense of insiders versus outsiders by the way local groups are listed together in one box and outsiders (for example, the EPA and Corps) are listed in another. In a sense, these lists of contacts map the community by listing the outside experts, information resources (libraries and web pages), and local (presumably sympathetic) groups. In many respects, therefore, the flier creates a new map of the community, one that has explicit layers of politics and ethics, and one that makes clear arguments via its representational practices.




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Just as it was difficult for us to see all the sources of ‘simple little texts’ such as the issue report and bullseye flier, their distribution was equally difficult to see. As we have discussed, the CEC is a key organization in a network of organizations in and around Harbor. The CEC has a solid sense of the community and of their audience and has developed a communication strategy designed to provide quality information to others. Their communication practices also serve as an organizing tactic and as a strategy that enables them to confront the Corps, EPA, and city. The CEC’s distribution network, while decidedly low-tech, was nonetheless effective. Members of CEC, particularly B, often noted that they simply ‘talked to people.’ What we learned is that they utilized in largely ad hoc ways their personal networks within the community to do just that, and we also learned that this was – as it always has been – effective. But some of this talk was organized, such as their use of a phone tree. It is also true that the meetings themselves were places where the group rehearsed public performances, spending time, for instance, on getting messages straight and planning for public meetings by developing questions and making sure that all questions were asked (often by assigning people to ask certain questions). Written texts were also distributed using their ad hoc networks. CEC was committed to a strategy of small documents in part because they were not capable of producing ‘large’ rhetorical performances due to their infrastructure, but also because they found small texts to be effective because they were easy to share, were easier to read, and provided a more focused message.8 They used the flier, for instance, as a kind of nexus for community action. We have already mentioned how B would distribute the flier to newcomers at CEC meetings. In this way, the distribution of the flier is part of a welcoming ritual. The flier thus becomes a tool for sociogenesis because its distribution becomes an opportunity to talk with others. As J, a community organizer with another organization in Harbor, said during a meeting, fliers work well for announcing meetings and increasing public participation. J said that not everyone reads newspapers, but they can get people to pass around fliers. Plus, when they pass out fliers they can talk to people. J believes that faceto-face communication makes people more likely to participate. This was confirmed by another citizen we spoke to. V said that information is spread through the community primarily by word-of-mouth and fliers. Thus, B’s summaries and K’s flier come in part from talk, but


Conclusion: from semiotic remediation to groups


they also get remediated back to talk as one person hands the text to another. The power of the CEC’s little texts and distribution practices was evident to us because we often heard representatives of other organizations say that they received scientific information from the CEC – or from B – and they even showed us issue reports that we had not seen before. Indeed, one of the most powerful neighborhood organizations in a neighboring town that shared an interest in the project reported that they got most of their information regarding the project from CEC. The requirement to remediate (among talk, texts, visual images, numbers, multimedia objects, and embodied performances) was commonplace and consequential for the people and organizations we worked with and studied in Harbor.9 Here we have attempted to focus on particular kinds of remediation (talk to text and text to talk) in one key scene of remediation work by using the meeting and a couple of ‘simple’ texts as fulcrums for other rhetorical practices. In the more detailed descriptions of invention (see Grabill, 2007), it is possible to see the infrastructures required to gather the information, people, sponsorship, and technologies in order to do science in Harbor. In this chapter, we have provided glimpses into how the fruits of these inventional practices were made intelligible to the organization through the primarily oral reporting practice of the meeting. We are able to see how written texts such as issue reports and fliers come in part from talk. But we are also able to see how they get remediated back to talk via the distribution practices of the organization. If J and others are right to say that passing out fliers offers an opportunity to talk, then the back-and-forth remediations between text and talk are constant in this community. That is, while we are confident with our characterization of the remediation practices of CEC as an organization despite the considerable difficulty in tracing these practices, we are also confident (though less so) that these talk–text–talk remediations are commonplace in the community at large because they are foundational to the work of community organizing and interpersonal politics in this community. This brings us to the relationship between semiotic remediation and sociogenesis. Earlier we expressed our caution with respect to sociogenetic claims, a cautiousness that increases the closer we get to macrolevel claims. We have more confidence in the claim that the rhetorical practices of organizations like CEC make things like groups, exigencies, even communities. There is a recursiveness in these processes of making. Semiotic remediation practices are necessary to make the rhetorical tools that make things like groups, and groups are themselves required





to do the rhetorical work itself. To invent is to assemble, to assemble is to invent. It is possible to see this recursiveness and invention in our examples. CEC uses simple little texts to establish the dredging project as a matter of public concern in the Harbor area. They use these texts to recruit, to organize, to gather. The results of their gathering activities make available new means of invention: new people, relationships, information, technologies, texts and so on. They continually reassemble the organization – each meeting we attended had a slightly different roster of attendees, for instance – and redeploy it to deal with the issues most relevant at the time, issues that are reported to the organization (orally) at the meeting and sometimes conveyed to CEC’s audiences (textually) soon after. All of this work is essential. With fragile groups like community organizations, it is probably easiest to see the value of Latour’s (2005) claim that without activity, there is no group. And fragile is the right word. It would take very little for an organization like CEC to fall apart. All they would need to do is nothing. Were that to happen, the dredging project as a matter of concern in this area would fade in inverse proportion to the CEC’s role so far in keeping it viable as an open question. The tools of groupness are rooted in the remediation practices we have described here. Remediation across modes is foundational to their larger inventional practices, practices that do indeed produce a number of simple little texts, but these texts are key to making things that are significantly more complex – groups, and ultimately, the very public issues of concern around which the people of Harbor gather to debate the shape, future, and well-being of their community.

Notes 1. Due to our IRB agreement, all names of places and people in reference to the Harbor project are pseudonyms, except for public institutions. 2. CEC was not the only organization we worked with. It emerged as a key organization because of its effectiveness and independence as a voice in this community. 3. The ways that ‘nonexperts’ in communities did science was central to our study. When we say we were interested how citizens did science, we mean that we chose to foreground the notion of invention and to explore the kinds of knowledge these inventional practices produced and how that knowledge was communicated (and its status). Most participants responded to the question of how they did science by first denying that they were, in fact, doing science, B included. But it was a way for us to have conversations about inquiry that did not assume that only the outside ‘experts’ engaged in inquiry.


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4. The question of the human model gets complicated quickly and is connected to the history of risk modeling in environmental science, where it has been common to assume a ‘normal’ human body for assessments such as this. It was not clear to us that every risk assessment for the Harbor project used the same healthy adult model. Therefore, this is a complex and contentious issue in Harbor, but most importantly for us, it was a scientific issue that CEC could and did engage. 5. The website now looks more high-tech as of this writing than it did when we worked in Harbor. The site now includes such things as buttons, borders, menus, and a coherent color scheme. When we viewed the site in 2003–5, the authors simply combined a few pages with images and html or email links. Such basic design issues as page margins and a consistent use of fonts and colors were absent. 6. As Paul Prior and Julie Hengst noted in responding to this chapter, the flier also evokes the kinds of maps used for nuclear weapons and accident scenarios. They also noted that the first words of the text are ‘three miles,’ which might be an allusion to the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in the US. Although we find that possibility intriguing, we did not hear anyone in Harbor make that connection explicitly. 7. Another citizen in Harbor said much the same thing as K. V reported that she uses a number of criteria to assess the trustworthiness of the information she is reading. First, she considers the source. She looks for information from people affiliated with a ‘well-known university’ and information from ‘credible’ newspapers. Second, she looks at document design. She said the information ‘has to look credible.’ Third, she said that she looks for the relative position of information as it appears in an online search. Where the information appears in, say, a Google search is important. 8. K, who is the primary writer of the bullseye flier, was explicit in favoring lots of small texts from the community over news articles and TV. He thought that mass media had the ability to make news but not to make stories. He thought that stories were more effective and had a mode of assembly quite different from what the media was capable of. He thought as well that small documents better captured and held people’s attention. 9. Inventional activities are described more fully in Grabill (2007), and some of the methodological issues as they pertain to technical and risk communication are detailed more carefully in Blythe et al. (2008).




Remaking IO: Semiotic Remediation in the Design Process Paul A. Prior University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Our experiences with, and understandings of, literacy are rapidly shifting as new technologies reorganize our inscriptional tools and practices and alter our semiotic landscape. A growing body of research (for example, Baldry and Thibault, 2006; Bolter and Grusin, 1999; Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001; Lemke, 2002; Manovich, 2001) has begun exploring ways to understand multimodal artifacts. However, the situated and mediated practices of producing new media have received limited attention (see, however, Johnson-Eilola, 2005). This chapter examines multimedia production in an Art and Design program at the University of Illinois, focusing on two Art and Design professors and two of their graduate student research assistants in the process of remediating (in Bolter and Grusin’s, 1999, sense) a web-based art object called IO, an interactive website mixing words, sounds, and images. Extending earlier analyses of the design process (Suchman and Trigg, 1993; Tang, 1988) and metapragmatic work on gestures and talk (for example, Goodwin, 2000; Hanks, 1990; Haviland, 2000, 2007; LeBaron and Streeck, 2000; Ochs, Jacoby, and Gonzales, 1994), the analysis in this chapter focuses on the semiotic remediation involved in the design production work of this group as they engaged in talk, drawing, listing, data entry, programming, and gesturing (especially over screens and paper). However, the basic framework for examining these practices is not limited to either design disciplines or the use of new media and information technologies. Semiotic remediation practices in this site, I would argue, are simply one face of semiotic remediation as a fundamental, ubiquitous dimension of human practice.


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As laid out in the introduction (Prior and Hengst, this volume), this analysis should be read in the context of related work that has examined chains of media and mediation in terms of notions such as recontextualization, resemiotization, intertextuality/interdiscursivity (that is, chains of utterances/genres/texts), and actor–networks. It aims in particular to illustrate an analysis that grapples seriously with semiotic remediation practices by linking five key lines of research: 1. 2. 3. 4.

The close study of situated activity (talk, gesture, action); The study of inscriptional processes as situated and dispersed activity; The analysis of inscriptional/semiotic objects (texts, images, film); The cultural–historical analysis of mediation (see Vygotsky, 1987, 1997b; Latour, 1999), particularly the distributed character of practices embodied as affordances of objects, devices, environments, and organisms; and 5. The cultural–historical examination of learning/socialization understood as the simultaneous and constant co-production of people and society. In this site, these five orientations add up to a focus on the way the work of this multimedia design team was accomplished and the way that work socialized design practices. This chapter then argues for a greater attention to the multimodal character of practices and particularly for attention to semiotic production – the production of objects in immediate contexts as well as over extended trajectories of action and interaction. A number of studies have looked at collaborative design or scientific– technical development teams and have examined the interaction of material artifacts (often textual), gesture, and talk. In a study of a research team at the Salk Institute, Latour and Woolgar (1986) identified the division of labor in the laboratory and the way the work of science was accomplished by transformative cascades of inscriptions and materials. Ochs et al. (1994) examined how physicists linguistically and gesturally animated graphic whiteboard representations of experimental results. Corrie and Story (2007), in an analysis of the face-to-face and remote interactions of a mathematics research group, focus on artifact-centered collaborative activity and usefully point to the situated marking up of graphics (for example, circling parts of a graph on a whiteboard display), artifact manipulation (for example,


Theoretical framework



revising the figures in a spreadsheet in the course of their interaction), and artifact production (such as writing a mathematical formula on the board while talking through it and pointing to a specific text that it pertains to). They also identify examples of digital gestures, such as pointing to or highlighting text on screen with a mouse-directed cursor. Based on ethnographically situated studies of scientists, Roth (2003) analyzes the way graphs are not simply ‘read,’ but are interactively animated through talk and gesture. This interactive work is located within a dialogic history of activity wherein scientists have come to know through intimate and repeated, embodied and imagined engagements with certain environments, objects, organisms, people, and tools. Haviland (2007) offers a rich analysis of semiotic transpositions (see Haviland, 1996) in a master’s class for a string quartet. His analysis displays the close relations across semiotics as the instructors move from miming the playing of instruments (sometimes in the air, sometimes bowing on fingers) to playing their own instruments or bowing on the student’s instrument as the student fingers the notes; as instructors evoke the score through gestures, song, humming, and other sounds; and as they characterize the score verbally and in metaphoric gestures. Haviland also notes the mediated and distributed dimensions of the interaction, considering as participants the instruments that students play, the composer of the score, and the intertextual history of uptake of composer and score. However, one limit of the analysis for understanding semiotic production is that we do not see any written annotation (by instructor or student) of student’s scores in this account (something that personal observation of cello lessons and orchestra practices leads me to think is common), much less the production of a score over time or the production of instruments. In fact, few situated studies of discourse practice have engaged seriously with inscription – the production of textual artifacts themselves. Goodwin (2003) examined the close interface of gesture and inscription in analyses of archaeological practice. However, the inscription he addresses is an archaeologist’s temporary drawing made in the dirt with a trowel. The map that the archaeologists were also using at the time is analyzed as a material structure, tied to environmentally coupled gestures (see Goodwin, 2007) and coordinated with the material structure of the actual ground of the site itself, but neither production nor annotation nor revision of the map itself is examined. Taking an ethnomethodological approach in their study of how controllers in a


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railway operations center transformed calls into commands, Heath and Luff (2000) included keyboard typing in their transcripts of interactions. They represented the precise sequential interweaving of talk and writing in generating the computer-mediated commands.1 However, in the same book when they analyze the collaborative animation and discussion of stories at a Reuters international news service office, they do not analyze the written texts actually and precisely related to their animation in talk, the keyboard writing itself, or the longer history of these texts as they were distributed to and from the offices. Suchman and Trigg (1993) analyzed the whiteboard activity of computer programmers working to design an artificial intelligence (AI) application for scheduling. Their analysis attended nicely to the evolving production of annotated drawings on the whiteboard and integrated the participants’ drawing into the transcripts in order to show the situated character of the reasoning that was undergirding the AI programming. Nevertheless, they did not go on to trace how this interaction linked to other interactions in the extended production of artifacts (software and its documentation). In short, these somewhat fleeting engagements with writing-asactivity (or the production of semiotic artifacts more generally) within situated studies need to be read against a backdrop of general inattention that seems to reflect the strong ideological–theoretical tradition of treating literacy as autonomous, decontextualized, directly derivative of speech, and artifactual (see the critical analyses of Brandt, 1990; Scollon and Scollon, 1981; Street, 1984). Even the richest theoretical and empirical work on situated practice tends to freeze writing (as though it entered the world from some other realm), to see writing as a noun (artifact) rather than a verb (activity), to specifically ignore writing/reading as activity while attending to fine-grained dimensions of talk as activity. For example, in articulating an otherwise rich account of recontextualization, Linell (1998) devotes almost exclusive attention to talk. When he does turn to writing, he touches briefly on the notion of writing as activity but fills in the blanks with cultural assumptions rather than the kind of close research attention he offered talk:


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The production of meaning takes place in interactions, on the one hand in the writer’s struggle with thoughts and words in conceiving and formulating the text and in her interplay with the text so-far produced, and, on the other hand, in the reader’s efforts in assigning meaning to the text and in using the text as a vehicle, as a means for


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Linell does invite us to consider text as a human product, to see writing and reading as acts, and notes the role of in-progress text; however, he imagines a culturally prototypical scene of writing (see Prior, 1998, for analysis of such scenes) rather than studying actual scenes of writing. In Linell’s scene, the writer is alone, the text is permanent, and the reader is somewhere else, making meaning on her own. Scollon and Scollon (2003) also display this tendency to treat writing as artifact in their account of geosemiotics – a theoretically rich, empirically rigorous examination of how semiotic practices are located in material worlds. They pay close attention to ways that texts are handled, to the complex textures of texts, to esoteric issues like text vectors in signage. However, writing does not appear as activity on this expansive map. Consider the following quote: . . . there are three ways in which language can be located in the material world, the interaction order (including speech, movement, gesture), visual semiotics (including text and images), and place semiotics (all of the other non-linguistic symbols that directly or indirectly represent language). Geosemiotics analyzes the semiotic systems among which we take action in the world. (p. 13) The interaction order is glossed here as ‘speech, movement, gesture,’ whereas writing (or at least its products) only appears in the next item, visual semiotics. It is true that this glossing of the interaction order is not presented as complete, yet writing as action does not appear anywhere in this book. In a later account of nexus analysis, Scollon and Scollon (2004) do include inscriptional activity as they again gloss the interaction order: ‘the talk, writing, gesturing, or image making of the people who are there as singles, as conversational pairs, as customer and server, and all of the other combinations by which people organize their social gatherings’ (p. 163, italics added). However, a few pages later, when they list six ways discourse is present in nexus analysis, they return to the distinction between the active speech of participants (one of the six ways) and inscriptions-as-artifacts (the second way being texts used as mediational means and the third being images or other semiotic systems


activating semantic potentials of words and text chunks, in the service of creating an understanding which somehow fits the contexts given and purposes which are relevant for him. (Linell, 1998, p. 268)


used as mediational means). Given that Scollon and Scollon are anthropologically oriented applied linguists who have long studied the way ideologies structure classifications of literacy (see, for example, Scollon and Scollon, 1981), it is telling that they display this fleeting, somewhat unstable, sense of writing as activity. In fact, not only must writing be done in particular times and places, but it is also often done in face-to-face social interactions. Writing as a face-to-face activity has begun to emerge in studies that look at people working around whiteboards and screens (see Hall, Stevens, and Torralba, 2002; Heath and Luff, 2000; Prior, 2007) as well as in situated studies of writing processes (see, for example, Beaufort, 1999; Cross, 1994; Iedema, 2003a; Kamberelis, 2001; Prior, 1998; Prior and Shipka, 2003). Face-to-face writing and reading are simply not that uncommon. Consider the variety of situations where we see group invention/response and writing on boards in schools and workplaces that routinely involves co-present writing and reading. It is worth noting that many early literacy experiences involve face-to-face reading and writing, something we should expect from a Vygotskyan perspective where practices move from the social to the (relatively) individual. The empirical and theoretical inattention to writing-as-activity cannot be explained away by the rarity of the phenomenon. Face-to-face inscriptional and multiply mediated activity represents a marked case of rapid and layered semiotic remediations that permeate everyday discourse practice. Interested in writing/inscription as situated, mediated, and dispersed literate activity (Prior, 1998), I am working to weave inscriptional activity into the story in this analysis of semiotic production, especially to examine several examples of writing/drawing as co-present interactional activity (rather than simply as material text). It is critical to bring the semiotic production of texts and objects fully into accounts of situated activity where so far talk and, to a lesser extent, gesture have figured as temporal, sequential actions, whereas writing and images have typically appeared simply as artifacts – given in rather than produced through interaction. It is likewise critical to locate such in situ inscriptional activity in longer chains of distributed activity rather than to focus solely on isolated local scenes.


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Studying IO as a site of semiotic remediation Figure 9.1 presents a screen capture from the original IO (on the left) and a draft version of a revised interface on the right (both converted here to grayscale). The original IO is currently (January 2009) exhibited, along with other works by Joseph Squier, in the electronic collections of



Figure 9.1 Screen capture of IO. A screen from the original IO is on left and a revised interface on right (both images have been converted to grayscale from color, the screen on the right for example was blue and the images on the left were diverse shades of orange, yellow, brown)

the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis, Minnesota (USA), although its functionality has degraded as operating systems and browser software continue to be updated (http://theplace.walkerart.org/). The original IO has two distinct spaces. On the right of the screen are layered and changing images, which respond to pointing and clicking and some other actions. On the left is an input box. When a user types in a word that the program recognizes, text appears in the black space below. The text is animated, fed letter by letter, with a typewriter effect. Moreover, the rate at which letters are fed is noticeably irregular, controlled by an AI program called Bob, a cousin to Joseph Weizenbaum’s AI therapist, Eliza (see Murray, 1998). The text is not presented continuously, but with line breaks that make it resemble poetry. If you type in the letters ‘I O’, for example, the following words may appear in the space below: here is where I live, this is the place of my origin this is the landscape of my consciousness


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On the right side of Figure 9.1 is one of several draft designs for IO’s revised interface. It includes a draggable circular input box (shown here


in the upper right of the screen) and the text is now fed directly over the images in an unmarked middle column space, where several words are visible in this screen image. Sound was also added. The revised IO was presented at several art shows but has so far not been stabilized and made available on the Internet for a variety of reasons. Screen capture movies of the two interfaces were included in Prior (2007). Joseph Squier produced the original IO working on his own. In an interview, Joseph discussed his long-term interest as a photographer in relating words to images, how he had switched from photography to electronic media, and how he had begun to focus on reworking existing images rather than photographing new ones. He described how he produced the original IO during a one-month, grant-funded retreat at a villa in the Italian countryside, working with his journals, a digital video camera, stored images, and his laptop computer. I actually started IO in Italy. I went to Italy for a month and worked on this piece every day . . . and I went with nothing but still images and this camera and my journal – my journals – that’s all I had [actually he noted later that he also, of course, had his laptop computer] and when I came back after a month, this is what I had. I did it all. And I, I had a studio . . . I’d, like, get up in the morning and go sit in the studio all day and I would actually close the blinds so I couldn’t look out the window and turn the lights out, and I sat in there in the dark, practically, for almost a month and that’s the best situation for me. The other fellows at the villa represented a multidisciplinary group. Joseph ate, drank, and visited with them, but they did not participate in his production work. Of course, the materials and tools Joseph used (the words and images, programs and hardware) had longer, more distributed histories. However, Joseph’s month relatively sequestered in Italy was sufficient to do the production work on the first IO. What led Joseph to decide to revise IO, the first art object he had ever chosen to redo after exhibition, was a change in technology. The original IO had many interesting features, but Joseph had not found a practical way to relate the images directly to the words, so that a particular input word would trigger a particular image or select from a particular subset of images. In addition, he began to think about adding sounds to the site and adding an interactive component, where users could offer potential new text and new images so that the next version of IO would become in his terms ‘an art project that learns.’ What


Paul A. Prior 213



triggered the decision to pursue these revisions was the release of Macromedia Flash 5, which brought the integration of sound, image, and text into the realm of the possible, as long as Joseph could also assemble a team with the right ‘skill set.’ To revise and redesign IO so that the presentation of words and images could be linked, he needed to recruit, and coordinate with, a small group who could bring more diverse programming expertise. In the first year of this revision process, the period I researched, Joseph worked with Nan Goggin, a graphic design professor with whom he had collaborated regularly; Christian Cherry, a dance professor who specialized in sound, but who worked directly on IO only for the first 3–4 months (because he took a position at another university); and two graduate student research assistants (RAs): Tony, who programmed and managed the database, and Eunah, who joined the project in the fall and worked on redesigning the interface. Drawing on data (videotapes of work sessions, interviews, screen captures of the website, print documents) collected over an 11-month period, this chapter examines the nature of semiotic remediation in the design process by analyzing video clips and transcripts of the group as they worked to enhance the site using new programs for the database and interface. The core of this analysis in the next section traces a series of interactions where the group developed and used a Flash template for the interface. This account foregrounds the complex array of mediational means and mediated activity the group chained together; it also forms the basis for several theoretical reflections at the end of this chapter that consider the nature of semiotic remediation practices in this site and beyond.

Whiteboard, paper, screen, body: building a digital architecture across media and time In this section, I trace the articulation of the digital architecture for IO across three particular meetings (in February, September, and November) as well as across a variety of media.2 The first meetings of the IO group in February focused on such issues as who was going to be involved in what capacity, what software programs would be used, what computer server would host/store the program during its development, and what the vision was for a revised IO. The basic team in the spring consisted of Joseph, Nan, Christian, and Tony. Joseph, Nan, and Christian were involved in this project as a part of their professional creative work as professors. For Tony, IO would provide the basis for his MFA thesis as well as offering a paid research assistantship. (When Eunah joined in the


214


following fall semester, IO served for her both as a research assistantship and as an independent study course.) In the early meetings in February, they agreed that they would explore using two open-source software programs (PHP, a database program, and MySQL, an inquiry program) along with Flash 5, and they decided to house IO on a dedicated UNIX server. A lot of discussion focused on where they could get a server from for this purpose since they did not have funding to purchase one and needed one that was fairly new. By the meeting on February 27, the group had set up the server in the studio and Tony had begun to work through possible database architectures. Figure 9.2 begins with Tony standing at a whiteboard, talking over a very abstract drawing of the database’s relation to Flash in the new IO.3 Tony is talking to Christian, who is sitting at a table unwrapping a sandwich for lunch. Meanwhile, Nan, also standing at the right edge of the whiteboard, has just drawn a set of boxes and begins to engage Tony in a discussion of how the images will be fed to the screen. She points to Tony’s drawing of the database on the left side of the whiteboard, and then draws an ‘x’ through several of the boxes in her drawing, saying one image would be that size. Tony responds with an ‘oh’ that suggests surprise or news. Nan then says that there are different spots in which the images will be placed and makes a series of rapid, pointing gestures with the marker (but not marking the whiteboard) toward different areas of her drawing. These gestures seem both indexical and iconic – pointing to areas in the drawing but also evoking images popping up on a screen. Sensing some uncertainty in Tony’s ‘Ok,’ Christian explains that Nan is drawing Tony a Flash template, at which point Tony moves back to the laptop on the table that all four had been looking at earlier in the meeting, relaunches the data entry screen for PHP, and reviews (as he had earlier) the five fields of the template. It is worth noting that one of the fields is ‘image location.’ It eventually becomes clear that a tension throughout this interaction was that Nan was focusing on the positioning of images on future IO screens that users would experience, whereas Tony was trying to work out how and where images would be stored in the database and fed into Flash. Continuing this interaction, in Figure 9.3, Nan has moved from the computer at the table back toward the right edge of the whiteboard. She wants to suggest that the images be classified in the database by size and that locations on the screen also be classified by type, so the images can be flexibly called to the screen. (How the images will be used, of course, does feed back into or depend on how the images are databased.) At the beginning of this strip of interaction, she is looking


Paul A. Prior 215



Tony:

…we cannot update every image

Nan:

[finishes drawing boxes on whiteboard, steps back]

Tony:

to the- to our database system

Nan:

so we have on the database [points to drawing related to database] like, ssss-, we, we're gonna pick like, [draws X over some of the boxes and holds the marker at the end as she says:] this is one image, would be here this size

Tony:

Oh

Nan:

we have different spots the image will be placed [pointing to different spots around the x, with quick beats of the marker over the surface, not touching it except to close the upper right box with a line; the beats seem to punctuate each word at the end of the utterance, two white arrows added to image to indicate iconic-indexical beats]

Tony:

ok ok

Christian: she’s drawing you, she’s drawing the Flash template Tony:

ok, (then) can see the database on uh…. [Tony walks over to laptop on table, Christian turns to see screen, Nan follows and looks over their shoulders, Joseph joins them], so Nan can see, so this is the field, actually we have 5 fields, one is the string we’ll use to search, this one is the image name, maybe we don’t need this, this is x-y coordinate, this is the location, location from here,

Nan: Tony:

right but you know we cannot use this location to retrieve images for the Flash file

Figure 9.2 Whiteboard and screen architectures (February 27)


216

at Tony and says that the images will be ‘3 sizes,’ making a kind of rectangular gesture in the air (what I’ll call a ‘box’ gesture). Tony’s uptake of this comment again suggests that it is news and he begins to ask a what-question as he moves toward the board. Nan seems to take the question as ‘what sizes’ and again gestures in the air that one would be ‘like this size,’ but adds that she does not know exactly, tracing


Paul A. Prior 217 Nan:

but I guess what I’m saying, is it possible since these images will all be, there’s going

eh

Nan:

all the images will be three sizes,

Tony:

three sizes, what-, what’s

Nan:

like this size (again Nan shapes her hands to make a rectangular shape), I don’t know what it is, exact (at the word ‘exact,’ Nan traces a square shape in the air, moving her right hand, index finger pointing horizontally and then vertically down as her left hand moves, index finger pointing moves up toward her face, three white arrows added to image to trace movement), but they’re all-, the images aren’t going to be random (waves her right hand and forearm, palm down and toward the floor, several times and shakes her head )

Tony:

oh, really?

Nan:

they’re going to be three different sizes, and then where-, what we'll do, is um, depend on what word you type in, it will call up an image and place it in one of [points to different areas of the large rectangle] maybe four places, so instead of doing, to me, all the x-y coordinates or locations, a location could be um, it could be a coordinate, but it could also just be B

Figure 9.3

Continuing whiteboard interactions (February 27 continued)

a large square in the air with her index fingers as she says ‘exact.’ She goes on to say that the image sizes will not be random, waving her hand several times and shaking her head to emphasize this point. She then moves to her key point, that the images might get called up to different areas of the screen and thus she suggests that the image positions be classified in the database of images – that is, that categories be given standard screen locations, like ‘B’ (i.e. like an algebraic variable), rather than individually coding x–y coordinates for each image. In Figure 9.4, Nan and Tony continue to talk and gesture over the whiteboard, while Christian begins to eat his sandwich, occasionally looking up at their interaction. After suggesting that images be classified as alphabetic variables, Nan elaborates that you could ‘put dog in B’ or ‘dog in C’, where ‘dog’ is presumably a hypothetical image in the


to be three sizes (shapes hands into a rectangular shape) Tony:



Tony:

ok,

Nan:

ok, put dog in B

Tony:

you just give

Nan:

or put dog in C,

Tony:

oh you mean this [points to upper left box) might be A

Nan:

yeah

Tony:

This B, [begins writing in A, B, C, D, E, F ]

Nan:

yeah

Tony:

C D, E, F

Nan:

Or even, [picks up different color marker, writing over the x in the boxes], I don't know if you can see this, but this be A [draws line from A]

Tony:

um-hm

Nan:

um, this one is B [draws around upper right box and draws line from B ]

Tony:

ok

Nan:

this might be C [draws around bottom right 4 boxes and draws line from C]

Tony:

but but you should give this information before the user choose

Nan:

the user won't choose

Tony:

oh we just randomly pick

Nan:

we pick, yeah, the computer picks in a way

Tony:

but, ok, but ok, so that'll make easy, because um, ok, so, so the image needed to be exactly the same size

Nan:

There's going to be a group that are this big,

Tony:

ok

Nan:

some that are this big…some may be this big (3 white arrows added to trace the path of

Nan's gesture on the board)

Figure 9.4 Annotating a drawing (February 27 continued)


218

database. Tony takes this up, pointing to the upper left box in Nan’s drawing and saying ‘this might be A.’ Nan agrees and Tony then elaborates by saying and writing letters (A, B, C, D, E, F) on the whiteboard around the top and bottom of the drawing, which might be construed as giving a letter to each box (though the middle row of boxes would then remain unlabeled). Nan picks up a different colored marker and


clarifies, retracing the ‘X’ that covered four squares of the drawing and suggesting that that area could be ‘A,’ also then drawing a line from the ‘A’ into the area. She then continues, tracing around the upper right square and connecting it to the ‘B’ Tony had written and then tracing around the bottom four squares and drawing a line from Tony’s ‘C.’ At this point, Tony begins to raise another issue, saying that they would need to give the user this information to choose. Nan says the user will not choose, the computer will, and Tony says that will be easy because the images will be exactly the same size. Nan then reiterates her point about the three sizes, this time coupling her gestures directly to the drawing on the whiteboard, saying there will be a group ‘this big’ gesturing to the top and bottom of the space marked ‘X,’ another ‘this big’ making the box gesture around the single square marked ‘B,’ and another ‘maybe this big’ tracing with her index finger from the upper right corner and covering two sides of a rectangle that would consist of six of the squares. With this gesture, she is implicitly revising her earlier, traced ‘C’ that would have been the same size (four squares) as her X-marked ‘A.’ Several turns after the transcript in Figure 9.4, Nan and Tony realized they were focusing on different issues. Tony was focused on how users might contribute images to the database, an issue Nan had temporarily forgotten as she focused on the need to set up the database to handle multiple image sizes that could load to different regions of the screen. The drawing/text on the whiteboard shown in Figure 9.4 and representing a revised IO interface involved at least 29 separate actions that touched the surface of the whiteboard, movements made by two people (Nan and Tony) using two different colored markers over a period of less than three minutes of interaction. These boxes representing the Flash template were drawn, written, talked, and gestured into existence in a continuous process of semiotic remediation as Nan and Tony worked to arrive at a common understanding. The drawing and discussion of this representation of a screen window were also being coordinated with the PHP data entry screen on the laptop as well as with the other drawing on the whiteboard (representing a database architecture) and with gestures in the air. Inscription at the whiteboard then emerged in sequential, temporal, co-present interactive acts; it represented writingas-activity rather than writing as only artifact (although inscriptions became artifacts-in-interaction and had at least potentially longer duration). Metapragmatically, Nan’s hand gestures worked to direct attention to particular artifacts and particular dimensions of the problem at hand, while they also decentered the indexical ground of present talk and


Paul A. Prior 219


220 Nan:

Exploring Semiotic Remediation as Discourse Practice …I designed that, the original um, template? (makes box gesture on table top)

Tony:

umhm, the grid

Nan:

the grid, yeah, that once, this one small square

umhm. that that, probably would be image type 1, but I’ll figure out, because I haven’t touched this for a while

Nan:

ok

Tony:

so I can’t remember

Nan:

if you could like, you have a copy of the grid, so if you could draw on

Tony:

yeah (said doubtfully)

Nan:

a picture on the grid, and tell me XXX

Tony:

um, yeah, take- take a look this

Joseph: (ahmmm, ok) Nan:

(let me get xx)

Tony:

(of image) type here, image, oh I just have image type

Joseph: are they the coordiTony:

one, two

Joseph: coordinates, or Tony:

yes, coordinates, that'll be the possible coordinate

Joseph: ok Tony:

like for image type 1, it will be the possible coordinate combinations, will be, one, two, three, four (pointing with index finger to each column head for image types) four, four possible coordinate

Figure 9.5 Revisiting the template and database (September 14)

representations on the whiteboard as she animated a future in which a user would be interacting with a finalized IO screen. Figures 9.5 and 9.6 come from a meeting on September 14th (almost seven months later) as the group reconnects after a summer of relative inactivity. Tony has just been reviewing with Joseph and Nan two possible ways of structuring the images in Flash (using an online Flash help screen to illustrate the options). They have also been looking at IO


could fit many places Tony:


Tony:

so, how, how about others

Nan:

so I did one, this size (tracing a shape on the paper-and-pencil layout),

Tony:

ok

Nan:

but that could go here or it could go here (pointing to 2 areas on the paper)

Tony:

oh, so, which size, this size

Nan:

yeah

Tony:

go here or go here, right, ok

Nan:

yeah, here, it’s a square,

Joseph:

so top of the corner, either here or there

Tony:

ok

Nan:

yeah, another one is this size,

Tony:

um hm

Nan:

so it could go here (pointing to an area on the grid ), you know, many places (pointing quickly to multiple parts of the drawing), we could say just pick a few I don't know. The other size was I think this, um, I gotta look now, but I think it's this one, but I can also change them, we need to figure it out.

Tony:

Ok, so, so give me this, type1 will be this, right? (Tony traces from upper left corner to a middle line and down with his index finger) and give me the, the (variable), the, the, the possible coordinates

Nan:

ok, ok

Tony:

like, ok, type 1 will be x1 or y1 or you know

Nan:

ok

Tony:

Um maybe we need change this, (probably) to four

Nan:

That's not too difficult, is it?

Tony:

yeah, I don't think so

Nan:

So I need to tell you.

Tony:

type 1 (xxx)

Nan:

How many types can I have?

Tony:

it, whatever, whatever

Figure 9.6

Aligning around the paper template (September 14 continued)


Paul A. Prior 221

screens and databases underlying them. Unlike in February, the database is now represented on the screen and partly already in place in code and stored data, partly available in the form of screen images. To choose which of two architectures available in Flash they should use for calling



up the images, they decide to experiment with both and see how they work. Tony then will need images to load for these tests. Joseph and Nan begin asking about how many image types the database is set up for and Nan asks how to label the images. Nan reminds Tony that images of one size might go to multiple positions on the screen, reminds Tony that they have talked about this before, and then recalls the Flash template. At the beginning of Figure 9.5, Nan makes a box gesture (compare it to hand shapes shown in Figures 9.3 and 9.4), flat on the tabletop as she refers to the ‘template,’ which Tony then describes as a ‘grid.’ Tony begins to pull up database screens. In the first close-up screen image in Figure 9.5, Tony is pointing to a table listing images in the database, but that table does not indicate how many image types have been defined. Tony then pulls up a second screen and begins to review the possible coordinates for placing images he classified as type 1. He touches the screen, from left to right, as he counts out loud but sotto voce each possible set of coordinates. Then he says ‘four’ twice, louder the second time, also moving his hand from the screen, turning his palm up, with four fingers spread, indicating the total gesturally as well verbally. Nan says she needs to get something. She stands up, walks to the central table, and returns with a piece of paper that she lays down on the computer table. In Figure 9.6, we can see an image of the paper Nan laid out on the table, an annotated pencil drawing of the Flash template. Unlike the whiteboard version, which consisted of nine more or less equal squares, this version is subdivided with a narrow column running down the middle. It has also been annotated by hand with measurements of the lines in inches and points/picas and with different intersections marked by their x–y coordinates in points (0/0 is the upper left corner; 432/720 is the bottom right corner). The annotations allow for variously sized rectangular or square images (such as the 6 × 4 space that is drawn and annotated in the lower left of the grid). Nan has just referred to one image as the big one (referring back to a large image that Tony had called up from the database), and then at the start of Figure 9.6 Tony asks about the other sizes. Nan describes one image as ‘this size,’ tracing with her index finger a space on the paper template, and then points to two areas it could go. She then says ‘another one is this size,’ again pointing to an area on the paper grid and saying it could go many places. Tony then confirms that type 1 will be ‘this,’ tracing with his index finger from the upper left corner (0/0) to a middle line and down the page, and then asks Nan to give him the variables, the possible coordinates. Throughout this interaction, the image types


222


are indexically anchored precisely to texts. Pointing and tracing on text and screen carry much of the semiotic load. Note, for example, that in the first 131 words of Figure 9.6 deictic terms appear repeatedly without explicit linguistic referents (here/there, 8 times; this/that, 9 times). Tony at first anchors his references to the PHP screens he has produced, whereas Nan anchors hers to the pencil template drawing she has produced. As the interaction proceeds, Tony and Nan begin to align around the template drawing as the governing text for their thinking and talk. Looking back at the image type table from the database screen, Tony concludes he may need to change the parameters for image type 1. Nan suggests that should not be difficult and Tony agrees. Then Nan asks how many types she can have and Tony answers ‘whatever.’ (It is interesting that Nan asks this question as it suggests that the ‘three sizes of images’ she has repeatedly referred to are not actually fixed yet.) Nan then begins writing a list on a lined paper pad on the table of what she needs to do next for the IO project while Joseph makes a similar to-do list in a small blank notepad attached to the inside cover of his PDA case. Finally, we will look at two strips of interaction from a meeting on November 2. Tony, Nan, and Eunah have been discussing what is now a working, if still buggy, version of IO. Eunah has been showing Nan some of the navigational screens and interfaces (introductory page; log-in and quit windows). They have not yet settled on the default background image for these screens. Two are actively being considered. Eunah shows them both to Nan. Nan makes positive comments to both, but seems more enthusiastic about a bright fairly uniform blue screen with large text filling it. Eunah then focuses on the other one, the one she likes. At the beginning of Figure 9.7, Eunah pulls up the background image and says she likes it. Nan agrees and then elaborates on some of its advantages (warm colors, the way text is displayed in its irregular brighter areas). Eunah then notes that this image also works best with the grid. She keys in some commands, and a grid appears over the image. The grid has a narrow column in the middle, like Nan’s drawing (see Figure 9.5). Nan says ‘that’s good’ in a quiet, uninflected utterance, and then repeats it emphatically. Reaching out with a thumb–index-finger measuring gesture, she touches the screen near the top of the dark middle column. Eunah, who had just canceled the grid, immediately keys it back in place, so fast that as Nan begins to move her thumb and index finger (still shaped in a measuring gesture) down the column space, the grid reappears before her fingers are halfway through this tracing movement. Nan notes that that this central column space matches where the text will be fed (a good thing because its relatively uniform darkness will


Paul A. Prior 223


224


Eunah:

I like this one

Nan:

yes, I do too, it’s warm, and I like the

Eunah:

yeah, and it’s best on the grid, it’s fit on grid (Eunah

Nan:

oh, yeah, that’s good, oh! that’s good (Nan traces

text XXX (pointing to text across screen),

the middle space on the screen with a thumb-index finger; Eunah, who had just removed the grid, keys it back up as Nan is sliding her hand down the screen so the grid reappears halfway through the movement) because that’s where the text goes

Eunah:

yeah

Nan:

great

Euhnah: I like it, XXX this one (Eunah uses the mouse to move the cursor roughly along the path displayed by the white line added to the screen image here, highlighting how the image on the screen relates to the grid )

Figure 9.7 Examining the interface (November 2)


keys in commands to call up a grid on the screen)

make the reversed, white, typeface quite visible). As Nan ends the gesture and moves her hand away, Eunah again takes away the grid, but uses the mouse to move the cursor from the edge of the image to its center, particularly calling attention to the middle column. Near the end of the meeting on November 2, Tony notes a bug that needs to be addressed. The screen space for IO images has a soft edge


Paul A. Prior 225 Tony:

I cannot load from this point, this is black, you know, I have to load within this (gestures on screen), this box,

Eunah:

um hm

Tony:

so I need to put your stuff here

paper grid to screen image), inside this (again traces the outside edge of the image twice all the way around with his index finger)

Nan:

yeah, so what I was going to try to do is to subtract

Tony:

so probably need, um, to change the position point a little bit, we should do some mathematic calculation

Nan:

so you have 72 extra on each side extra

Eunah:

yeah

Figure 9.8

Realigning the template (November 2 continued)

framed in black. Images are supposed to feed into the central space, but they are feeding into the black frame (and thus do not appear where they are supposed to appear). In Figure 9.8, the computer screen on the right where Nan and Eunah have been working again displays the dark background image for the interface with the grid over it. Tony reaches over and says he has to load within ‘this box,’ gesturing to the foregrounded image that matches the grid. He then picks up Nan’s paper copy of the grid and places it over the screen image, aligning it roughly to the central image space and saying he needs to put their stuff (the images) ‘here,’ now pointing to the intersection of the paper template and the screen image. Finally, he takes the paper away and traces all the


(places paper over screen, aligning



way around the edges of the central image grid twice with his index finger, saying ‘inside this.’ Nan says they will have to subtract; Tony agrees that they’ll need to change the position points mathematically, and Nan asks Eunah to clarify if there are an extra 72 points on each side of the central rectangle. Eunah confirms this. Thus, an image coded to align to 0,0 (the top left corner of the grid) would need to be recoded as 72,72 to load in the correct position on the screen. These interactions at three meetings spread over ten months display some of the complex mediated activity that stood behind the remaking of IO’s interface. The design was formulated and reformulated in talk, on the whiteboard, in paper drawings, in gestures often made over paper and the whiteboard, in co-present writing and drawing (as when Nan drew on the whiteboard as Tony watched), in notes on paper, in entries in tables of a computer program presented on the screen, in digital spaces of representation, and even through digital gestures of cursor movement or simply window and program management (such as Eunah’s use of the mouse to gesture toward the structure of the background image or her keyboard commands to display and hide the grid, both seen in Figure 9.7). These interactions also make it clear that semiotic remediation can be simultaneous as well as sequential. In conversations around the whiteboard, Nan, for example, was often simultaneously representing the interface in talk, in the artifact of the drawing-as-it-was-then-inscribed, through co-present drawing and writing, and through gestures. Participants frequently gestured to screens using the mouse and cursor to highlight an area, sometimes with a rapid back-and-forth movement of mouse and cursor, but they also frequently touched the screen with their fingers for similar purposes. The richness and flexibility of semiotic practice are highlighted by this fluid movement between gestures that are digitally mediated and hand gestures on and over the screen4 – as well as by the broader orchestration of gesturing in the air or on and over pencil drawings on paper, drawing and annotating on whiteboard and paper, reading of screen and print texts, writing (on keyboard/screen or on other physical media), and talking.


226

Gesturing around IO: a dialogic account Gesture studies (see Kendon, 2004) have been somewhat focused on defining the relationship of gesture to language. However, language has typically figured in such discussions in its dominant linguistic form, that is, as a Saussurean–Chomskyan abstract system. Dialogic analyses


of gesture as equivalent to what Bakhtin (1981) and Voloshinov (1973) named utterance have not emerged with clarity. Several recent analyses have begun to move toward a more dialogic analysis of gesture. For example, Parrill (2007) analyzes a particular gesture that David McNeill made in two separate conversations (separated by three years), a gesture that was associated with his notion of the growth-point. Parrill’s analysis, however, conceptualizes this gesture’s repetition in traditional, structural terms as a speaker-specific gesture equivalent to an ideolect rather than seeing it dialogically as a gestural self-quotation. LeBaron and Koschmann (2003) analyze the public emergence of ‘transparent understanding’ among a group of nursing and medical students in a video-conferenced educational interaction. In particular, they note how gestures representing heart murmurs and thrills (a medical term) emerged and were repeated/reformulated by others in the interaction. LeBaron and Koschmann were highlighting the way gestures are taken up and reworked as interactional accomplishments, but did not analyze these data from the perspective of dialogic theory, which would trace histories beyond the immediate interaction. In a more dialogic approach, Becvar, Hollan, and Hutchins (2005) analyze how a biological researcher produced a representational gesture (a particular hand form) to represent a protein (thrombin) and its behavior as she interacted with her research group. They note that ‘representational gestures can be built upon, and referred back to, during a stream of discourse, and, moreover, stabilized,’ and that such gestures are ‘historically contingent’ (pp. 106–7). Becvar et al. note that the ‘thrombin hand gesture’ displayed the kind of stability usually associated with inscriptions, allowing it to operate as a cognitive artifact in distributed cognitive processes of representing the world. Across the three IO meetings I have analyzed here, we see that Nan formed her hands to make rectangular- or square-shaped gestures that were meant to refer to images or screen spaces of certain (different) sizes. I have called these related instances a box gesture. Along with the paper-and-pencil grid, the database tables, and verbal reference to ‘three image types’ – the last, I would argue, working as a stabilized metonymic trope (rather than a precise enumeration) for some set number of images and its implications for design – the box gesture served as one of a set of stabilized and stabilizing semiotic forms in the interactions of the IO group. The box gesture came in different forms, more or less open. The tightest form, with fingers of both hands touching or almost touching, can be seen in Nan’s gesture in the middle of the


Paul A. Prior 227



three images at the bottom of Figure 9.4 (February 27) and in the first image in Figure 9.5 (September 14). Nan’s gesture in Figure 9.5 (coupled with her verbal reference to ‘the original template’) represents, I would argue, the gestural equivalent of unmarked direct speech (that is, a recognizable repetition indexed to a prior or represented other instance of a sign token). The point then is not to ask whether this gesture was the equivalent of a word in a dictionary (the question asked when language is theorized as an abstract system), but whether this series of gestural acts attained a coherent, reusable sense and function in a history of situated use (the question asked by dialogic theories, which challenge [see Bakhtin, 1981] the very notion that we get our words out of dictionaries, material or mental). The box gesture is, in this sense, a clear case where the need for a dialogic account of gesture is palpable.

Chronotopic laminations and indexicality Semiotic remediation involves not only the operation of signs-in-action across different media, but also the navigating of multiple indexical fields. One way to talk about such fields is through Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of the chronotope (space-time). For Bakhtin, chronotopes involved embodied and representational worlds. Bakhtin briefly noted the multiplicity of chronotopes managed as a reader inhabits both the here-and-now embodied experience of reading as well as the fictional world of a novel. This dual, dialogic reference to sociomaterial here-and-nows and to imagined worlds (historical past, possible future, fictional, hypothetical, religious, and so on) makes chronotopes a particularly agile theoretical construct and well suited to the task of addressing indexical fields (see Lemke, 2005; Silverstein, 2005). In earlier work (Prior, 1998; Prior and Shipka, 2003; Prior et al., 2007), my colleagues and I have proposed the notion of chronotopic lamination, linking chronotopes to the notion of lamination – the simultaneous management of multiple social frames and footings as laid out by Goffman (1974, 1981) and Goodwin and Duranti (1992). We suggested that chronotopes may also be embedded as affordances (Gibson, 1979) in semiotic and material artifacts. The chronotope of the road (Bakhtin, 1981), for example, can be read in a narrative (a representational chronotope) and it can be lived experientially in an actual journey (an embodied chronotope), but it can also be a chronotope embedded in such sociomaterial forms as roads, signage, maps, and inns for travelers. More to


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the point, in activity all three of these chronotopic dimensions are necessarily fused. As another formulation for tracking the kinds of indexical decentering and recentering that Hanks (1990) described, chronotopic lamination highlights not only the dazzling multiplicity of indexical fields we routinely must manage, but also the profound historicity and heterogeneity of those fields. In the studio work of the IO group, multiple chronotopes were being managed and several key chronotopic layers were routinely being juggled near the surface of the interaction. In general (and quite simplified) terms, one was the chronotope of the immediate embodied studio interaction, the here-and-now world of this creative–technical collaborative group. A second was the chronotope of computer architectures, an imagined space of databases, programs, interfaces, and screens. The whiteboard drawings and the computer screen windows of programming interfaces represented this space. As Manovich (2001) noted, the database spatializes as architecture what will often be displayed in temporal, even narrative, action on the screen (videogames being a handy, widespread example). These two more or less co-present chronotopes were being coordinated with shadow chronotopes (drawing an analogy to Irvine’s, 1996, notion of shadow conversations): chronotopes of past/future studio activity by individuals and groups – found, for example, in planning talk or in rehearsals of past discussions and decisions; and critically the chronotope of the user – a hypothetical space-time where a user interacts with a future finished IO. In an earlier analysis of Nan and Eunah discussing a prototype of the quit dialog window, I noted:

Interestingly, this conversation focused on what IO should say to users, in the written text dialog box of the circle interface, before they quit the program. In the first line, Nan points to an IO prompt on the screen, Do you want to leave IO?, and suggests possible alternatives. Indexically, Nan quickly shifts from what this should say to what you and we would say, making the point explicit in her second turn (the machine is talking to us). She offers three direct representations of what the machine might say, intended to function as candidate revisions: Are you sure you want to go?, Are you sure you want to leave me?, and Are you sure you have to go? (Prior, 2007)


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In that analysis, I focused on Nan’s externalization of the motives for a specific revision of wording, and the way the revision was being orally composed seemed to be directed at Eunah as well as at revising the text, trying to ensure that Eunah took up the perspective that IO should be designed to simulate a human interacting with the users. Nan explicitly highlighted the personalization of IO and offered a somewhat petulant sounding alternative (Are you sure you want to leave me?), before moving back to the more neutral Are you sure you have to go? I argued, therefore, that Nan’s responses were directed at the socialization of Eunah as well as the entextualization of IO’s personality. Here I would extend that point to note the ways that Nan and Eunah were managing the layered chronotopes at play: the immediate embodied and digitally mediated interaction with the interface screen; the shadow chronotope of a projected future where IO functions as a simulated interactant with a user; projected future studio work, where Eunah will not only be revising the wording of this screen but also taking up a stance on IO that is implemented in other language and design choices; and the chronotopic layers of instruction – where this interaction is socializing Eunah into design practices that she would carry beyond the IO project. Nan’s interactions with Tony at the meeting in February were likewise oriented to multiple chronotopes. She was projecting not only the future scene of an eventual IO user and the chronotopes of computer architecture, but again working to socialize Tony into design work, to extend his technical expertise with computer programs to support artistic work. In a wider circumference, Nan and Joseph were leading a new program in media narratives, developed specifically to blend training in graphic design and computer programming so as to support the creation of new media narratives and art. These interactions then can be read as working not only to socialize Tony and Eunah, but also to build new social practices and spaces in the profession and the world. This listing of chronotopic layers has aimed to highlight certain generalized, but foregrounded dimensions of chronotopic lamination, not to exhaust it. Semiotic remediation is involved not only in indexically negotiating chronotopic laminations, but also in the ongoing production of people, places, things and so on that makes up chronotopic worlds. From the perspective of dialogic theory then, semiotic remediation is historical in the sense that it makes and remakes history as well as that its meaning potentials derive from historical chains of activity.


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The notion of semiotic remediation does not just point to signs being transformed across media. As we noted in the introduction to this collection, it also aims to foreground the notion of mediation. Variously articulated in cultural–historical activity theory (CHAT) and actor– network theory (ANT), mediation calls particular attention to the work of artifacts and tools (semiotic and material) and how such artifacts and tools carry – as embedded affordances – the traces of the projects of their producers and users (the work and values as enacted in particular environments). In discussing the concrete use of graphs in ecologically and biographically situated histories, Roth (2003) suggests a modification in the understanding of mediation in CHAT theory, particularly in the relation of tool to object [that is, the object(ive) of the activity, the problem space being transformed]: . . . in the everyday work of graph users, signs and referents, tools and objects are continuously exchanged . . . [there is an] interchangeability of objects and the tools that mediate subject-object relations and . . . there are always multiple and not always compatible and interchangeable tools that mediate the relation to the other entity. It is therefore more useful to think about networks of entities, any one of which can take the role of object, all others being available as potential resources for mediating the primary relation. (p. 198) This argument plays well with Spinuzzi’s (2004) observation of the importance of multiple mediation (multiple, orchestrated tools as opposed to typical CHAT representations of activity systems with single tools) and with ANT (see Latour, 2005, for an overview), where socio-material worlds are understood as constituted through associating multiple human and non-human actors in flat, dispersed, rhizomatic networks. The interactions of the IO group certainly involved a heterogeneous collection of tools and acts. Actions in a short strip of studio interaction might routinely include formatting and writing the PHP/MySQL database; viewing and gesturing over a computer screen that displayed the interface as well as over a whiteboard and pencil drawings that represented it; using a PDA for scheduling tasks; talking and gesturing in face-to-face interactions; note-taking; and reading texts in books and


Pythagorean pixels: heterogeneity and heterochronicity in chains of practice


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• multiple computer programs – Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, PHP, MySQL, Dreamweaver, Bob, text editors, and Internet browsers; • diverse texts – drawings of the interface with numbers and words, notes on paper with drawings, books, and screen texts (for example, help windows); and • various interactive formats – face-to-face interactions that weaved together talk, gesture, object manipulation, shared writing and drawing; interactions with computer programs; Help programs embedded within programs or available online; and online user forums. In the introduction, we noted Hutchins’ (1995) account of heterogeneity and heterochronicity in practices. In the remaking of IO, heterogeneity and heterochronicity were highly visible as cutting-edge computer programs and their output on computer screens was elaborated through paper-and-pencil drawings and hand gestures; as the web and Photoshop remediated (in Bolter and Grusin’s, 1999, sense) both photography and art; as the relatively long-standing literate form of the how-to book was supplemented by a variety of online texts (including asynchronous interactive user forums). The Flash template at the center of my analysis in this chapter was a particularly striking example of heterochronicity in an even more fundamental sense. In an interview in December with Nan, I learned – after months of seeing the template in various mediated forms – that its point measurements encoded in PHP/Flash programs and in pixels on screens were actually designed to align with mystical Pythagorean notions of mathematical harmony – specifically, the golden section/proportion that has been so widely used in Western art and architecture since ancient Greece and that also appears to be quite prominent in many natural forms (Elam, 2001). This proportion, approximately 1:1.618, was echoed in the 432 by 720 grid (1:1.66666) of the overall Flash template as well as in the way the template was subdivided in a fashion resembling dynamic rectangles – a means of using irrational fractions to produce harmonic subdivisions (Elam, 2001). These Pythagorean pixels in IO – linked to long, deep histories of shadow conversations and shadow objects in Western mathematics, art, and architecture – point to the remarkably unremarkable presence of embedded chronotopic lamination and the ways such lamination is implicated in heterogeneity and heterochronicity.


on screens. Such interactions involved quite heterogeneous mediational means, including:


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This chapter has highlighted inscription and semiotic production as both situated in local interaction and dispersed across time. The whiteboard drawing of Nan and Tony in an early meeting and its dialogic reverberations in other meetings months later suggest the need for methodological and theoretical tools that can illuminate and trace the complexity not only of moment-to-moment mediated activity, but also of the extended histories of people, discourses, artifacts, tools, practices, and institutions. The analysis in this chapter suggests the value of the notion of semiotic remediation for such tracing of new media design processes. However, more broadly, I am arguing that this kind of heterogeneous and heterochronic mix of mediational means, this kind of semiotic remediation, is a pervasive feature of human social practice, not an anomalous development of the digital age. Following Irvine (1996) and Hanks (1990), semiotic remediation itself appears to be a basic process as transpositions, shifts, centering, decentering, and blending occur across semiotic channels/modes, across material media (including the biological media of brain and body), across social frames and laminated chronotopes. As Haviland (2007) displays so clearly in his analysis of musical instruction, people are capable of shifting incredibly rapidly and fluently between and among semiotic worlds. This semiotic agility should be seen as a simple extension of Goffman’s (1981) discussion of multiple footings. The texture of semiotic remediation has been altered by technosocial development in quite consequential ways to be sure and has been shaped into specialized sociocultural forms (such as those Haviland documents in the master musician class); however, managing multiplicity is simply part of everyday existence. As opposed to conversation analysis’s notion that talk is the primordial state of human interaction, this analysis suggests that the management of multiple (inner and external) semiotics, footings/frames, and chronotopes has always constituted the common ground of an embodied, symbolic species living culturally in a material-temporal world.


Conclusions

Notes 1. See Leander and Prior (2004) for a discussion of several ways that writing and drawing can be represented as sequential activity in transcripts. 2. The data for this study include video and audio recordings of 14 group meetings (each usually lasting at least an hour); several video recordings of individuals working on the project outside of group meetings; interviews with



Joseph, Nan, Tony, and Eunah; and a collection of texts, including screen captures and electronic files. This collection occurred over a period of approximately 11 months. The IO project continued on an irregular schedule for at least a year after the data collection ended. 3. These transcripts are presented with loose transcription. Pauses are not marked. Ellipses indicate elisions of text. Unintelligible speech is marked by XX, and any uncertain transcription is surrounded by parentheses. This transcript also includes selected frames from the videotape. The images have been processed (cropped, brightness and contrast adjusted to highlight key features, and sometimes annotated with arrows to indicate gestures). Arrows from the transcript to an image indicates approximately where the image occurred in relation to the transcript. Arrows from an image to another image display a text/screen that the participants were working with in the initial image. Prior (2007) presents video excerpts of some of these interactions. 4. It is important to emphasize that, in this context and many others, digitally mediated gestures are not virtual. Moving the mouse and keying commands involve moving the hands and body, and those movements, as well as their mediated consequences on the screen, are visible (and sometimes audible) to co-participants in this activity.


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Semiotic Remediation: Afterword Judith T. Irvine

What should we understand by ‘Semiotic Remediation,’ the title and theme of this work? This was the first question that came to mind when I was asked to write an afterword for the present collection of essays. The title reminded me of a volume that appeared a generation ago, Semiotic Mediation (Mertz and Parmentier, 1985). While that volume’s concerns are still relevant, it seemed to me that enough time had elapsed, and enough additional intellectual work had been done, to make room for a new collection representing a new intellectual move. The starting point for the move, however, is the groundwork laid in the earlier book. Although some scholars might now take that groundwork for granted, in 1985 it was necessary to argue for the importance of a broad conception of semiosis – for a theory of signs and signfunctions that would bring context, both social and material, into the analysis of the ways signs mediate between the world and our understanding of it. Such a theory, argued Mertz in her editorial introduction, should draw heavily on the work of Peirce and his conception of the sign as grounded in the world. Peircean semiotic, with its tripartite set of sign-functions, contrasted with views dominant in other fields 25 years ago – fields that conceived of the ‘symbol’ (in then current symbolic anthropology) and the linguistic sign solely in terms of decontextualized referential meaning. The crucial argument in 1985, then, was to show how semiosis mediates among psychology, culture, and experience. That argument is now well established in the fields that explore discourse practice. The present volume can move ahead, therefore, and consider not just mediation, but remediation. In so doing, it offers food for thought on what ‘remediation’ might concern – and whether its emphasis is on media, or on remedy, or on some sort of reiteration, or


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combinations of these. As Prior and Hengst indicate in their introductory essay, some scholars who have written of ‘semiotic remediation’ have focused on multimodality and transfers among media. To insist on this reading of ‘remediation’ in terms of media, however – as necessarily involving different semiotic modalities – would require a better-defined conception of ‘modality’ than is generally to be found in the literature. Otherwise, modality is too easily conflated with a simple technological sense of media, and many interesting topics would be overlooked. In contrast, Prior and Hengst offer a concept of remediation that centers more on repurposing. Remediation, in this sense, implies taking up some previously existing form but deploying it in a new move, with a new purpose. I hesitate to call this process a remedy, although it might be, if new semiotic action arises out of a perceived problem it is designed to solve. But this is not exactly the direction of our present authors’ thinking. Instead, their emphasis is on social and semiotic process, on ever-emergent social relations, and on the ways semiotic forms can serve as resources for social agents. Obviously, these two conceptions of semiotic remediation – multimodality and repurposing – overlap. A message initially produced orally and later displayed on a written placard would presumably be an example of remediation under either interpretation of the term, if the placard were produced for a different moment and in aid of some at least slightly different project. But many other kinds of communicative acts can be thought of as repurposing – thus semiotic remediation – even if their semiotic modality itself does not change. Reported speech, for instance, perhaps embedded in oral narrative (as in the classroom scenes described in Juzwik’s chapter), involves remediation even though remaining in the oral medium. Similarly, ‘repurposing’ nicely captures the relationships among the various drafts of the Australian Open Disclosure Standard described by Iedema. Remediation thus refers to a wider set of communicative processes than just those involving media transfer. The ‘semiotic’ part of our title, meanwhile, is what indicates a broad focus on many kinds of signs, not only linguistic signs. Although all the essays in this volume do make some linguistic text or practice central to the analysis, many of them also bring in other kinds of sign modalities as well. In some cases the relationship among several co-occurring sign modalities is exactly what permits recognizing the contribution of any one of them. As Hengst points out in her study of the communicative practice of people with aphasia, attention to the ways they and their partners manage to communicate despite quite limited linguistic abilities ‘helps us to see beyond


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the bright lights of language, to recognize how much communicative weight other semiotics can and routinely do bear.’ Could a study of semiotic remediation focus on practices in which there were no linguistic signs centrally involved at all? Presumably so; recall that an old-fashioned kind of structural analysis used to line up practices in various nonlinguistic media, equating them as contrast sets. Thus, for instance, a seating arrangement at a feast might be compared with the colors of participants’ clothing and with the set of foods on offer, as if all of these modalities expressed (say) some hierarchy of social relations. What was generally missing from those structural analyses, however, was attention to the talk that did in fact occur at the events being analyzed and was generally crucial to their success as social occasions. (Also often missing was any sense of social process, of the ways social relations constantly evolve and are constituted, not just displayed, through the semiotic means in which they are enacted. That sense of process is central to the present set of essays.) To be consistent with this volume’s broadly semiotic conception, a study that concerns data in more than one kind of sign modality needs to take into account the special properties of those particular sign types or materials. For example, the bright colors and varying fonts of the Open Disclosure statements, as Iedema shows, contribute to the documents’ authoritative and confident effect. In another case, Roozen discusses the various representational media – handwritten notes, scorecards depicting mathematical symbols, digital texts, the ruled forms of ‘mathemagician character sheets,’ and so on – through which a budding math teacher moves, as he links his own education in mathematical concepts to his pedagogical practice. In Roozen’s chapter the analysis rests not so much on the visual particulars as on their great variety, and the ways they draw together a seemingly disparate set of activities, formal and informal, in the young teacher’s life. Other essays in this collection similarly explore representational trajectories, sometimes across modalities, and sometimes across social moments and their purposes. What is it that links representational forms such that they constitute a trajectory, or a remediation? The re- prefix in ‘remediation’ implies that something important is taken to be the same, while situated in a different event of semiosis. Sameness and difference are in the eye of the beholder, however. If I have two quarters in my pocket, either one of them can go in the coin slot that secures my coat in a locker at the gym; they are interchangeable for that purpose, as two tokens of the same type. On the other hand, when I look at them closely I discover that one is marked ‘2005’ and has a picture of a buffalo on one


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side, while the other is marked ‘1985’ and shows the worn outline of an eagle, wings raised. For the gym locker these two tokens count as the same; for the coin collector, interested in assembling examples of all kinds of quarters produced as United States currency, they do not. The example is simple, but perhaps its implications are more complex. How are notions of sameness and difference grounded in interests? What is the basis of those interests and the practices they underwrite? When people’s interests vary – and they always do – whose interests, whose notions of sameness and difference, are to prevail? Remediations, as relations among events of semiosis, must be located in regimes of value – in ideational (and ideological) systems through which relevant aspects of semiotic form become identifiable for the social agents who draw upon them. Semiotic forms are not simply prior to the social purposes they serve. Instead, semiosis and social purpose are mutually embedded. The example of the two quarters also points toward questions about temporal flows and scales. Suppose the mint produces a constant flow of quarters all displaying the same date and design, even though there may be microscopic differences between individual tokens of the type. Now suppose the mint stops production for a month; then it resumes, but without changing the coin design. Presumably the resumed production, a reissue of the ‘same’ coin type, can be considered a repurposing – harnessing an existing semiotic form to a new purpose, such as a newly perceived need for more quarters circulating in the currency. Is interruption or temporal discontinuity necessary to our conception of remediation? Presumably not; even without an interruption in the flow of token production the purpose of producing the tokens might shift, just as a speaker might shift addressees in mid-sentence without any perceptible interruption in the flow of words. If a change of addressees is a repurposing, however, or implies one, we must remember that a social actor can have more than one purpose at a time. Purpose is complex and can include projects on various scales of time, space, and social relations. In the literature on language and discourse practice there are several models and approaches that may be useful in thinking through what semiotic remediation and repurposing might encompass. Classic models would include Jakobson’s (1960) hierarchy of communicative functions; recall that his notion of ‘function’ is an orientation to some aspect of the event of communication, such as its channel, its addressee, or the message form. To the extent that this sense of function is related to purpose, Jakobson’s multifunctional conception of language can help account for how purposes can be multiple and how purposing – and


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repurposing – can subtly shift. Another classic model is to be found in Goffman’s (1974, 1981) notion of participation frames, but since participation frames and participant roles are discussed at some length by Prior and Hengst in their introductory essay, I will not belabor the point now. Closer to the present day than Jakobson’s or Goffman’s work is some relevant literature from my own disciplinary home that can helpfully be brought to bear on the issues in our collection. A recent theme in the work of some linguistic anthropologists is an interest in interdiscursive relations, in historical chains of events, and, in general, in the circulations of objects, texts, and discursive forms across places, occasions, and interpretations. Following after the papers in Silverstein and Urban (1996), a collection cited by Prior and Hengst, examples of such work include two special issues of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, one on temporality and history (Inoue, 2004) and one on intertextuality (Agha and Wortham, 2005). These works’ concern for how discursive forms might be linked across events of speaking or writing – events that may be far apart in time or space – has a clear connection with the studies in the present volume, although the historical or geographical scale has been larger in some of the anthropological studies. For example, Eisenlohr’s studies (2004, 2006) of diasporic language and ritual practice in Mauritius draw interdiscursive connections between people and events over the many miles between India and Mauritius, and the many decades since the early days of South Asian migration to the island. Perhaps in keeping with the large distances and time spans they cover, anthropological works such as these do not always attend to as much specific detail in their linguistic and behavioral analyses as do the studies in the present volume. What these anthropological works do emphasize, however, is the set of ideological frameworks that inform a network of interdiscursive relations and organize the perspectives and purposes of social actors – a useful complement to the analyses in this volume. Helpful too, as we think about purposes and repurposing, is attention to the shape, or kind, of interdiscursive relations that we trace. This, I believe, is the challenge for the next stage of our collective work. The studies in this collection reveal very effectively that a series of events – or communications in a range of modalities – can be shown to be semiotic transforms and complements of one another, and that such repurposing can serve to further a social project. In so doing, the set of studies makes an important analytical move, exploring social process and dynamics – hence the concept of remediation. Some problems remain, however. I will mention two – questions that have led me to think about what





I am calling the shape of interdiscursive relations, and the nature of the remediations. The first question is this: how many events of semiotic transformation should one look at, and why? How many remediating moments need to be included in an analysis? To be absolutely exhaustive is impossible. The studies in this volume variously explore how some text or set of ideas is translated from one semiotic practice to another, in some sequence or process in which semantic content, or textual form, or the set of people involved in the practice – or various other aspects of the communicative moment – may be gradually transformed. In each case, however, despite the careful detail in which the author explores these remediations, there are always more steps, more moments that could have been considered, or more details that could have been brought in. For example, among the studies that describe remediations from oral to written form or from simple written text to posters with graphics, our authors differ as to whether they include the moments when the writing, or the graphics, were actually produced. I mention this difference not in criticism of the authors, but merely to call attention to the decisions that have implicitly been made as to which data are important to include and which are not. What is the basis of such decisions? How should the researcher decide where to delimit the data and where to focus the analysis? In many of the present studies the author was an important participant in the events under study, and the particular role he or she had in those events seems to have determined the scope and accessibility of data. Author involvement need not be problematic; in fact, the longstanding method of participant observation, so heavily relied upon by ethnographers, depends upon it. It does imply a next analytical step: that is, a step back from the scene of one’s immersion, in order to find a new vantage point from which questions about the scope and selection of data can be confronted, without losing the advantage of one’s intimate knowledge of the scene. This combination can be difficult to achieve. So too is a combination of intimacy and self-consciousness about the selection of data, so that we do not dwell on the detail of a particular moment of observation just because we happened to be there. In short, events of semiotic remediation must be selected for study not just because we participated in them, and not just because we can see the remediation taking place, but because the repurposing matters. The challenge, then, is to attend to where and why a particular moment or form of remediation is consequential – to be able to show explicitly what was at stake, and why and how that moment, or those actions,


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were important. A particular moment might represent a tipping point, when signs of something – of a political candidate’s rise to prominence, or of a neighborhood’s decline, or of an economic recession, or of a student’s control of a topic, or of something else – become conspicuous and definitive. Alternatively, a particular moment of remediation might be one in which a crucial decision was made, a decision affecting many people or having long repercussions. Or a particular moment might represent what Silverstein (2003) has called a ‘baptismal event,’ defining the terms of reference for subsequent events (as when a child’s baptism defines the name by which people will refer to that child ever after; or when, to paraphrase one of Silverstein’s examples, an authorized expert declares that a certain sample of wine rates a score of ‘90’ in a tasting test, and that score is subsequently displayed prominently in advertisements for the vintage). These are but a few examples of consequentiality that should affect the selection of data for analysis. Now for the second question: what about absences? Are the data under examination defined in some important way by what they are not, or by some exclusionary process? Is there something important that people are not talking about? Are there opponents against whom people are marshalling support? The problem here is how to consider the practices, persons, and moments that are outside and distinguished from those under analysis. For example, in Grabill and Blythe’s study of local-level environmental activists, it is clear that the context is one of opposition to government and industry groups identified as sources of environmental endangerment. The activists need to walk a fine line: they must show that they are authoritatively knowledgeable about ecological issues, yet they must also be identifiable as ‘your neighbors’ – as a grassroots movement of ordinary folks-like-you who are conspicuously not an arm of government, not members of an elite class, not representatives of industry. Trust must be carefully managed. Is the shape of remediation different, in a context of opposition, from its shape in other circumstances? Highly relevant groups and actions take place offstage. Offstage action is one kind of absence; careful omission is another. Iedema’s study of hospital disclosure practices locates its material in the broad context of a growing ‘culture of accountability’ that sometimes places more emphasis on the appearance of accountability than on the fact. (Like me, readers will have encountered an increasing number of websites that demand feedback on the quality of their offerings or the effectiveness of their presentations. And you may also have been subjected increasingly to surveys promulgated by bureaucrats who, you suspect, are more interested in diffusing responsibility for their actions





in a time of rising unemployment than in the specific results of the survey, much less the value of your time.) Iedema describes hospital administrations that find it expedient, in cases of poor patient outcomes, to offer a partial apology. Culpable or not, hospitals hope to avoid the expenses of lawsuits, which can be very costly even if they are won. But to what extent are patients and their families really satisfied with a response that fails to include any admission of actual culpability, in cases where the families believe the hospital may be at fault? Statements like ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ and ‘I feel your pain,’ have become clichés. How does the hospital navigate this terrain – avoiding triteness while also avoiding admission – and how does the patient receive what is said and what is not said? What is said takes place against a backdrop of what is not said, an absence that may be glaringly obvious. After mentioning some antecedents for the present collection, in this afterword I have tried to suggest some next steps that might be taken as we think about events of semiotic remediation and about the purposes, and acts of repurposing, of social agents. By way of conclusion, let me return to the matter of author involvement, this time with a reflexive glance at our own activities as authors participating in the production of this volume. When an author of one of these studies wrote up the chapter that described a set of data and pointed out the semiotic remediations those data reveal, the act of writing represents another remediation, as the author moves from initial participation in creating the data to a very different communicative moment. Yet another remediation takes place over the course of events as the volume moves into print production. Scribbling with my pencil, and thinking of Prior and Hengst, to whom I will send my text, I look ahead to the moments in which the scribbles will be transformed into electronic traces and, further, toward later moments and the hoped-for wider audiences that might ultimately be reached when the volume goes into print. To look ahead means that all these moments, their purposes and their repurposings, are simultaneously envisioned, in a complex projection of participation frames and their semiotic resources. In short, the production of this volume on semiotic remediation, a volume that marks an interesting new moment in the study of discourse practice, exemplifies its own topic.


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260


Ackerman, J., 184, 243 Adam, C., 26, 248 Adler, M., 87, 243 Agha, A., 2, 239, 243 Alexander, K., 108, 254 Alvarez, A., 14, 27, 247, 260 Amann, K., 170, 243 Applebee, A., 78, 243 Asen, R., 184, 243 Australian Council for Safety and Quality in Health Care, 140, 146, 147, 148, 243 Australian Health Ministers’ Advisory Council, 146, 243 Australian Health Ministers’ Conference, 140, 146, 148, 151, 243 Bakhtin, M., 2, 3, 6, 12, 14, 116, 227, 228, 243 Baldry, A., 5, 23, 206, 244 Bamberg, M., 80, 108, 244 Banks, M., 139, 141, 144, 145, 251 Banning, M., 184, 244 Barton, D., 27, 244 Basso, K., 107, 108, 244 Bateson, G., 57, 244 Bauman, R., 79, 81, 82, 92, 94, 107, 244, 249 Bazerman, C., 2, 7, 8, 10, 23, 36, 37, 55, 56, 244, 247, 252, 253, 256, 257 Beach, K., 49, 244 Beaufort, A., 27, 211, 245 Becker, H., 30, 245 Becvar, L. A., 227, 245 Bellwoar, H., 5, 228, 256 Benson, D. F., 137, 245 Berkenkotter, C., 8, 245 Berry, P., 5, 228, 256 Bhatia, V., 7, 245, 257 Bismark, M., 155, 245

Blommaert, J., 6, 245 Blythe, S., 188, 205, 241, 245 Bobrow, D., 157, 245, 260 Bolter, J., 1, 5, 7, 185, 186, 206, 232, 245 Bound, K., 155, 258 Bourdieu, P., 10, 11, 12, 13, 49, 142, 143, 245 Bowker, G., 8, 245 Branch, T., 92, 245 Brandt, D., 53, 54, 78, 106, 209, 245, 246 Brass, J., 78, 246 Briant, R., 155, 247 Briggs, C., 79, 81, 82, 244 Brodkey, L., 53, 54, 246 Brooke, R., 60, 61, 246 Brouwer, D., 184, 243 Brown, J. S., 157, 180, 246 Brownhill, S., 151, 251 Bruner, J., 17, 107, 134, 246 Cain, C., 49, 250 Callon, M., 142, 246 Camitta, M., 50, 246 Canadian Patient Safety Institute, 148, 246 Capps, L., 23, 78, 79, 80, 81, 98, 104, 108, 111, 112, 116, 255 Chaiklin, S., 23, 246, 258 Chewning, B., 5, 228, 256 Cicourel, A., 17, 159, 166, 245, 246 Clark, H., 4, 5, 117, 246 Clinton, H., 140, 246 Cole, M., 2, 14, 246, 259 Collins, H., 157, 247 Committee on Quality of Health Care in America, 140, 247 Coogan, D., 184, 243 Corno, L., 60, 61, 247 Corrie, B., 207, 247 Craveri, B., 78, 106, 247


Author Index

261


Author Index

Cross, G., 211, 247 Csikszentmihalyi, M., 57, 58, 247 Dauer, E., 155, 245 Davis, G. A., 137, 247 Davis, P., 155, 247 de Certeau, M., 81, 247 Deetz, S., 155, 247 del Rio, P., 14, 27, 247, 260 DePew, K., 52, 247 Descombes, V., 142, 247 Devitt, A., 2, 7, 247 Disclosure Working Group, 140, 247 Drew, P., 23, 247, 254 Duff, M., 112, 118, 250 Duguid, P., 157, 180, 246 Duranti, A., 23, 81, 228, 246, 249 Dyson, A., 78, 248 Eco, U., 139, 248 Edwards, J., 142, 248 Eisenlohr, P., 239, 248 Elam, K., 232, 248 Elkins, J., 23, 248 Engeström, Y., 14, 244, 246 Eurobarometer, 140, 248 Fairclough, N., 2, 7, 142, 248 Frame, S., 107, 109, 113, 117, 118, 138, 250 Freedman, A., 26, 244, 248 Fung, H., 108, 115, 254 Gallagher, T., 141, 248 Gamoran, A., 78, 79, 243, 255 Gannaway, R., 107, 109, 113, 117, 118, 138, 250 Garfinkel, H., 159, 166, 248 Gee, J., 79, 85, 248 Georgakopoulou, A., 80, 105, 108, 244, 248 Gerrig, R., 4, 5, 246 Gibberd, R., 146, 260 Gibson, J., 228, 248 Gilbert, G. N., 157, 178, 248 Goffman, E., 4, 5, 17, 82, 83, 113, 114, 115, 233, 239, 248, 254 Goncu, A., 138, 256

Gonzales, P., 206, 255 Gonzalez, V., 193, 249 Goodnow, J., 11, 254 Goodwin, C., 6, 81, 109, 206, 208, 228, 246, 247, 249 Goodwin, M., 108, 249 Grabill, J., 185, 187, 188, 203, 205, 245, 249 Griesemer, J., 104, 258 Grimshaw, A., 159, 249 Grusin, R., 1, 5, 7, 185, 186, 206, 232, 245 Gumperz, J., 79, 81, 249, 250 Habermas, J., 142, 154, 249 Hadjioannou, X., 103, 249 Hage, J., 155, 249 Hall, R., 211, 249 Hamilton, J., 146, 260 Hamilton, M., 27, 244 Hamm, G., 140, 146, 252 Hanks, W., 2, 4, 5, 6, 12, 19, 111, 115, 117, 206, 229, 233, 249, 250 Harrison, B., 146, 260 Hart-Davidson, W., 193, 250 Haviland, J., 4, 18, 111, 115, 138, 206, 208, 233, 250 Heath, C., 23, 209, 211, 250 Hegney, D., 151, 251 Hengst, J., 1, 30, 54, 55, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 117, 118, 136, 138, 140, 185, 250, 254, 256 Heritage, J., 23, 247 Hofstadter, D., 57, 58, 59, 74, 250 Hollan, J., 227, 245 Holland, A., 109, 250 Holland, D., 49, 250 Hor, S., 151, 251 Hunter, J., 26, 252 Hutchins, E., 2, 14, 15, 29, 34, 227, 232, 245, 250 Hymes, D., 79, 107, 251


262

Iedema, R., 2, 10, 139, 143, 144, 151, 211, 251 Inoue, M., 239, 251 Irvine, J., 2, 4, 5, 9, 10, 37, 116, 117, 229, 233, 251


Author Index 263

Kachur, R., 78, 255 Kagen, A., 109, 252 Kamberelis, G., 8, 211, 252 Karpf, A., 155, 252 Keane, W., 2, 10, 252 Kelly, S., 78, 80, 84, 103, 251, 252 Kendon, A., 23, 113, 114, 226, 252 Ketter, J., 26, 252 Kita, S., 23, 249, 252 Knorr-Cetina, K., 157, 170, 243, 245, 246, 252 Koschmann, T., 227, 253 Koven, M., 108, 115, 254 Kraman, S., 140, 146, 252 Kress, G., 5, 6, 23, 158, 161, 206, 252 Labov, W., 79, 80, 81, 107, 108, 111, 112, 116, 135, 252 Lachicotte, W., 49, 250 Langer, J., 78, 243 Latour, B., 1, 9, 10, 29, 40, 52, 55, 58, 60, 72, 142, 157, 186, 187, 192, 204, 207, 231, 246, 253 Lauer, J., 190, 253 Lave, J., 11, 19, 23, 116, 246, 253, 258 Law, J., 36, 55, 56, 57, 58, 74, 253 Lay-Yee, R., 155, 247 Leander, K., 6, 103, 233, 253 LeBaron, C., 206, 227, 253 Lefevre, K., 190, 253 Lemke, J., 5, 6, 13, 48, 63, 74, 80, 104, 117, 206, 228, 253 Levinson, S., 4, 249, 250, 254 Linde, C., 79, 254 Linell, P., 2, 209, 210, 254 Long, D., 79, 255 Lownsbrough, H., 155, 258 Lucas, M., 141, 248 Luff, P., 23, 209, 211, 250

Lunsford, K., 5, 228, 256 Lupton, D., 155, 254 Mallock, N., 151, 251 Manias, E., 151, 251 Manovich, L., 206, 229, 254 Mark, G., 193, 249 Marshall, J., 103, 254 McLean, J., 155, 254 McNeill, D., 23, 254 Medved, M., 158, 180, 181, 254 Medvedev, P., 2, 243 Medway, P., 27, 54, 244, 254 Mehan, H., 159, 254 Merton, R., 157, 254 Mertz, E., 18, 235, 254 Miller, P., 11, 108, 113, 115, 250, 254 Mirel, B., 185, 254 Mishler, E., 85, 254 Mistry, J., 138, 256 Molle, D., 8, 255 Mosier, C., 139, 256 Mulkay, M., 157, 178, 248, 252, 255 Murray, J., 212, 255 National Patient Safety Agency, 140, 255 Nelson, J., 60, 61, 255 Nelson, K., 108, 255 Neuman-Stritzel, T., 107, 109, 113, 117, 118, 138, 250 Newby, L., 146, 260 Norman, D., 157, 245 Norrick, N., 108, 117, 255 Norris, S., 2, 5, 13, 23, 253, 255, 257, 259 Nystrand, M., 78, 79, 80, 84, 103, 243, 251, 255 Oatley, K., 158, 180, 181, 254 Obama, B., 140, 246 Ochs, E., 19, 23, 78, 79, 80, 81, 85, 98, 104, 108, 111, 112, 116, 134, 135, 206, 207, 255, 257 Ogborn, J., 158, 252 Orlikowski, W., 7, 255


Jacoby, S., 206, 207, 255 Jakobson, R., 83, 139, 238, 239, 251 Jewitt, C., 6, 23, 158, 252, 259 Johnson-Eilola, J., 206, 251 Jones, R., 2, 13, 253, 255, 257 Jorm, C., 139, 141, 144, 145, 151, 251 Juzwik, M., 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 98, 103, 251, 252

Parmentier, R., 235, 254 Parrill, F., 227, 255


Author Index

Paterson, R., 155, 245 Perrott, B., 151, 251 Peterkin, A., 140, 255 Phelps, K., 152, 255 Pierce, C., 6, 256 Piper, D., 151, 251 Polanyi, M., 158, 180, 256 Powers, C., 155, 249 Pratzel, J., 112, 118, 137, 256 Prendergast, C., 78, 255 Prior, P., 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 14, 18, 23, 27, 30, 38, 49, 51, 54, 71, 83, 110, 111, 113, 138, 140, 185, 186, 205, 207, 210, 211, 213, 228, 229, 233, 234, 244, 253, 255, 256 Prusak, A., 80, 105, 258 Ravotas, D., 8, 245 Riley, K., 188, 205, 245 Rogoff, B., 11, 138, 256 Rohan, L., 5, 228, 256 Roozen, K., 1, 5, 27, 30, 51, 55, 110, 140, 185, 228, 237, 256, 257 Rosa, A., 2, 259 Roth, W., 208, 231, 257 Rougle, E., 87, 243 Rudolph, D., 134, 255 Runciman, W., 146, 260 Russell, D., 23, 26, 244, 252, 256, 257 Saferstein, B., 160, 164, 169, 170, 173, 174, 182, 183, 257 Sarangi, S., 159, 257 Sauer, B., 185, 257 Scheeres, H., 151, 251 Schegloff, E., 17, 257 Schiffrin, D., 79, 257 Schug, S., 155, 247 Schutz, A., 159, 257 Scollon, R., 2, 13, 23, 28, 29, 30, 43, 49, 74, 75, 113, 114, 116, 117, 209, 210, 211, 257, 258 Scollon, S., 2, 13, 23, 113, 114, 117, 209, 210, 211, 258 Scott, A., 155, 247 Sebeok, T., 143, 144, 251, 258 Semino, E., 4, 258 Sfard, A., 80, 105, 258 Shah, T., 107, 108, 258

Sheehy, M., 103, 253 Sheridan-Rabideau, M., 5, 228, 256 Sherry, M., 78, 80, 84, 85, 103, 251, 252 Shipka, J., 1, 5, 6, 14, 27, 30, 49, 54, 55, 110, 140, 185, 211, 228, 256 Short, M., 4, 258 Silverstein, M., 2, 6, 11, 17, 23, 79, 81, 85, 238, 239, 241, 250, 251, 258 Simmons, W. M., 185, 249 Skidmore, P., 155, 258 Skinner, D., 49, 250 Smagorinsky, P., 103, 254 Smart, G., 26, 258 Smith, B., 79, 258 Smith, D., 159, 166, 258 Smith, M., 103, 254 Smith, R., 108, 134, 255 Solberg, J., 5, 228, 256 Sommers, N., 53, 258 Sorensen, R., 151, 251 Sperry, L., 108, 254 Spinuzzi, C., 8, 193, 231, 250, 258 Star, S., 8, 104, 245, 258 Stevens, R., 211, 249 Story, M., 207, 247 Streeck, J., 206, 253 Street, B., 209, 258 Studdert, D., 155, 245 Suchman, L., 206, 209, 258 Swales, J., 2, 7, 8, 40, 259 Tang, J., 206, 259 Tannen, D., 23, 79, 83, 252, 259 Taylor, C., 108, 134, 255 Thibault, P., 5, 23, 142, 206, 244, 259 Tolstoy, L., 106 Torralba, T., 211, 249 Trigg, R., 206, 209, 258 Trimbur, J., 52, 53, 259 Tsatsarelis, C., 158, 252 Tuckett, A., 151, 251 Twohill, S., 139, 141, 144, 145, 251


264

United States Institute of Medicine, 146 Urban, G., 23, 79, 81, 82, 85, 239, 250, 251, 258


Valsiner, J., 2, 259 Van Ittersum, D., 5, 228, 256 Van Leeuwen, T., 5, 6, 23, 161, 206, 252, 259 Van Maanen, J., 49, 259 Vines, P., 141, 259 Voloshinov, V., 2, 3, 7, 14, 15, 83, 227, 259 Vygotsky, L., 14, 15, 17, 57, 186, 207, 211, 259

Wilden, A., 140, 260 Williams, A., 151, 251 Wilson, R., 146, 260 Winograd, T., 158, 260 Wood, H., 159, 254 Woolgar, S., 9, 157, 207, 253 Wortham, S., 12, 49, 79, 105, 239, 243, 260 Wu, L., 79, 255

Walker, J., 5, 228, 256 Walton, M., 147, 260 Wartofsky, M., 53, 57, 260 Wenger, E., 11, 19, 49, 116, 253, 260 Wertsch, J., 2, 14, 23, 27, 28, 43, 59, 260

Yanez, A., 26, 257 Yates, J., 7, 255 Zachry, M., 193, 250 Zeiser, S., 79, 255


Author Index 265


A action research, 188 activity, 1–3, 6, 8, 10–11, 16–18, 22, 52–4, 59, 103, 135, 186–7, 192–3, 207–8, 229–33 distributed, 14, 193, 211 literate, 8, 25, 30–1, 51, 211 mediated, 2, 13–16, 59, 214, 233 rhetorical, 184–7 semiotic, 10, 54, 81–2, 103, 118–23 situated, 2, 6, 21–2, 54, 207, 228 Actor–Network Theory (ANT), 1–2, 9–10, 19, 29, 40, 52, 55, 58–60, 72, 142, 186–7, 192, 204, 207, 211, 231 affect, ix, 13, 15–16, 20, 73, 116, 140 affordances, x, 21, 113, 116, 140, 207, 228, 231 alignment, 9–10, 21, 50, 71–4, 101, 113–15, 122, 127–9, 133–5, 171, 220–3, 225–6, 232 aphasia, x, 20–1, 107–38, 236–7 artifacts, 2, 5, 7, 9, 14–16, 18, 21–2, 24–30, 47–50, 52–6, 71, 206, 211, 219, 228, 231–3 authorization, 149, 153

co-, 11, 16, 18 comedy (stand-up and skit), 5, 20, 25, 27, 30, 32, 36–8, 40, 45, 47–9, 51, 113 communities of practice, 28, 145, 152 computer, 5, 14, 21–2, 70, 84, 124, 157–8, 179–80, 194, 209 interaction with, 165–79, 214–26 programming, 209, 211–14, 229–32 contextualization (decontextualization/recontextualization), 2, 8, 11–12, 16–20, 63, 79, 81–3, 86–7, 91, 95, 98–105, 110, 115, 154, 185, 207–9, 235 conversation analysis (CA), 17, 233 creativity, 4, 38, 49, 56–9, 214, 229 Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), 207, 231

B breakdowns, see disruption C centering (decentering/recentering), 4, 111, 229, 233 chaining, 1–2, 5, 7–10, 13, 16, 19, 27–30, 48–9, 54–5, 116–17, 186, 193–5, 207, 211, 230–2, 239 character sheet, 44–7, 237 chronotopes, 6, 18, 22, 38, 116–17, 133–5, 228–30, 232–3 see also lamination – chronotopic citizen science, 21 clinic, see institutional context

D decontextualization, see contextualization design, 21, 153–4, 179–80, 199, 206 architectural, 142–3, 155 dialogic, x, 1, 11, 20–2, 80–4, 116–17, 133–6, 208, 226–8, 230–3 semiotics, 2–7, 16 discourse, x, 3, 5–9, 54, 56, 103–4, 117, 147–8, 152–5, 157, 169–70, 178, 186, 210, 227, 233 analysis, 13, 16–20, 27–9, 85, 112, 137–8 communities, 25 genres, 12, 103 itineraries, 13, 29–30, 116–17 see also trajectories literary, 91–2 mathematical, 25, 31, 33–6, 40, 43–6, 48–9, 51 narrative, 107–15, 118, 135, 138 see also narrative


Subject Index

266


practice, 1–2, 10–16, 18–20, 22, 109–10, 136, 211, 235, 238, 242 public, 184 situated, 1, 6, 17, 117 see also mediated discourse analysis disruption, 10, 58–9, 70, 72, 109–10, 123, 134–6 distributed cognition, 2, 15 drawing, 8, 10, 21, 28–9, 166, 172, 206, 208–9, 211, 214–33 see also inscription E educational exhibits, 156–65, 179–83 embodied activity, x, 3, 6, 10–11, 14, 16, 20–2, 46–7, 100–3, 112–16, 135, 203, 207–8, 228–33 emergent 7, 11–13, 19, 78–82, 87, 102, 111, 114–15, 117, 135, 219, 227, 236 entextualization, 20, 79, 81–3, 87, 91–5, 101–4, 230 see also contextualization ethnographic, 16–18, 25, 28, 144, 208 evaluation, 15–16, 73, 79, 100, 112, 116, 121–4, 128, 130–3, 135, 139, 141, 145 exosomatic, see externalization externalization, 14–16, 134, 157, 230 see also artifact F flexibility, 4, 12, 57–9, 110, 118, 226 footings, 4, 114–15, 129, 133, 228, 233 see also lamination G genetics (science of), 156–83 genre, x, 5–8, 10, 12, 18, 27, 32, 41, 55, 103, 108, 115, 139, 154, 195, 201, 207 occluded, 8, 40 systems, 2, 7–8 see also discourse – genres gesture, 5–6, 13, 19, 22–3, 59, 79, 81, 85–6, 91–3, 95, 98, 100–4, 106, 112, 118–23, 135–7, 159, 169–70,

174–8, 206–8, 210–11, 215–28, 232, 234 beats, 216 pointing, 113, 115, 119–22, 127–8, 130–3, 158–9, 167–76, 178, 180–1, 208, 212, 215–25, 229 representational gesture, 227 studies, 22, 226–8 golden section, 231–2 gradient of resistivity, 142 H habitus, 10–13, 29, 49 heterochronicity, 14–15, 34, 231–3 heterogeneity, 7, 10, 15, 18–19, 22, 30, 34, 55, 72, 113, 229, 231–3 heterogeneous (symbolic) engineering, 10, 36, 55–9 home, see institutional contexts I ideology, 15–16, 18, 209, 211, 238–9 image, 6–7, 13, 20, 29, 35, 53–5, 59, 61, 64–6, 68, 74, 142, 159, 161, 163, 167–8, 170–8, 181, 185–6, 198–201, 203, 205, 206–7, 210–28, 234 indexicality, 4, 6, 9, 11–12, 16, 18, 25, 37, 39, 86, 92, 108, 111, 115–16, 138, 143–4, 158, 164, 172–3, 176, 179–80, 215–16, 219, 223, 228–30 indexical field(s), 6, 116, 128–9, 228–9 indexical ground(s), 4, 108, 111, 115–16, 129, 138, 219 indexical order(s), 6 see also decentering/recentering inner semiotics (inner speech, inner intonation, inner style), 16, 186, 233 inscription, 9, 12, 22, 29, 39–40, 195, 206–11, 219, 227, 233 see also writing, drawing institutional contexts, 8, 11, 20, 26, 54, 84, 182, 233 clinic, 20–1, 109, 118, 134, 136, 140, 146–55 community, 117–18, 138, 184–5, 188, 190, 205


Subject Index 267


Subject Index

institutional contexts – continued home, 13, 18, 29, 64, 69, 117, 123, 188 school (classroom), 12, 18, 20–1, 24–7, 30, 37–40, 46–50, 55, 60–3, 69, 73, 75, 77–87, 94, 102–6, 114, 117, 143, 156–60, 164–5, 178, 180–3, 188, 198, 211, 236 studio, 213, 215, 229–31 workplace, 8, 26–7, 211 interaction orders, 113–17, 135–6, 210 interdiscursive, 2, 6, 239–40 see also chaining interiorization, 15–16 interpretive procedures, 102, 156–7, 159, 165, 172, 180–1 intersemioticity, 139 intertextual, 2, 5, 7–8, 153, 207, 208, 239 see also chaining invention, 36, 45, 184–95, 203–5, 211, 228 K knowledge, 29, 41, 51, 143, 149, 152–3, 156–9, 171–4, 190, 194–7, 204 declarative, 181–2 organizational, 193 procedural, 157–8, 173, 180–2 L lamination, 7, 13–14, 105, 110–15, 122–4, 128–9, 135 chronotopic, 14, 129, 228–33 see also chronotopes; footings; shadow language, x, 1–3, 5, 9–10, 12, 14–15, 19, 43, 53, 78–9, 81, 83, 93, 109–10, 115, 118, 123, 129, 135, 137, 142–3, 149, 153–4, 210, 226–8, 230, 237–9 see also linguistics learning, ix–x, 3, 6, 14, 19–20, 28, 38, 48–9, 55, 60–8, 72, 75, 156, 158, 165, 167, 170, 172, 174, 176, 178–82, 207

linguistics, x, 2–3, 5, 12, 17–22, 54, 79–83, 86–7, 107–8, 110–13, 116, 135–6, 142, 154, 158, 160, 163, 165, 167, 172–8, 181, 207, 210–11, 223, 226, 235–7, 239 see also language linguistification/delinguistification, 142, 147, 153–4 literacies, 1, 50, 53, 78, 104, 106, 206, 209–11 literate activity, see activity – literate M mathemagicians (mathemagic), 40–7, 237 mathematics, 14, 20, 24–5, 30–1, 33, 36, 38, 41–8, 51, 207, 232 see also discourse – mathematical meaning storage, 140 see also artifacts; externalization media, 1–2, 5–7, 9–10, 13, 15, 21, 23, 27, 30, 45, 50, 54, 116, 140–1, 152, 154–5, 185–6, 205–6, 213–14, 228, 230–3, 235–7 mediated discourse analysis, 2, 13, 28–30, 48–9, 75–6, 116–17, 210–11 mediation, 1–2, 5–6, 14–15, 26, 207, 231, 235 see also activity – mediated memory, 14, 137, 186 episodic, 158, 180–2 semantic, 158, 180–2 methodology, 1–2, 16–20, 22–3, 26, 52, 83–6, 111–12, 135, 144, 186–7, 205, 233, 240 mode, 1–7, 13, 54–5, 140, 156–65, 170–2, 178–83, 185, 189, 195, 233 see also media; semiotics; semiotic remediation multimodality, 1, 5–7, 54, 59, 71, 110, 113, 236


268

N narrative, 8, 14, 18–21, 30, 40, 49, 54, 73–4, 77–83, 87–105, 107–13, 115–38, 176, 228–30, 236 analysis, 46, 80, 83–6, 111–12, 137–8


Subject Index 269

O Open Disclosure Policy, 21, 139–41, 145–55, 236–7 oral, 8, 37, 191, 195, 197, 203–4, 230, 236, 240 see also talk, spoken language P play, 20, 25, 40–8, 55–9, 70, 72, 109–10, 113, 118–19 plurifunctionality, 12 pointing, see gestures practice(s), 1–3, 5, 7, 9–15, 17, 19–20, 22, 26–8, 30, 48–9, 54, 71, 78, 80–1, 102, 107, 110, 112, 115–16, 134, 139–45, 153–4, 159, 186, 191, 195, 201, 203, 206–9, 211, 230–3, 237–8, 240–1 clinical, 136, 153 communicative, x, 12, 54, 59, 71, 82, 107, 109–10, 136, 155, 202, 236 language, 3, 236, 239 literate (composing, inscription, inventional), 18, 22, 26–7, 40, 48, 74, 78, 192, 203–4, 206 pedagogical, 52, 237 rhetorical, 203 see also communities of practice; discourse – practice; narrative – practice; nexus of practice; semiotic – practice process information, 157, 163 production, ix, xi, 4–8, 10, 13–14, 16, 19, 21–2, 27–8, 36, 45, 49–50, 52, 54–6, 75, 113–14, 116, 118, 123, 134–5, 137, 158, 165, 182, 198, 206–9, 211, 213, 230, 233, 238, 242

Q quilting, ix–xi R re-, 11, 13, 16, 18, 22, 237 reception, 4, 6–7, 54, 114, 116, 137 recontextualization, see contextualization remediation, 1, 7–10, 22, 27–30, 38, 40, 46–8, 66–72, 74, 80, 82–3, 100–2, 104, 142, 185, 189, 197, 203–4, 235–42 see also semiotic remediation reported speech, x, 3–5, 83, 110–11, 113, 118–19, 121–2, 236 representation, 2–11, 15, 21, 27, 33–4, 36, 38–40, 45–7, 49–50, 53–4, 56, 71, 100, 110, 134, 142–4, 156–60, 163–7, 169–72, 174, 176, 178–83 narrative, 111, 116 representational media, 2, 15, 27, 30, 34, 45, 50 representational world, 6, 115 re-representation, 29–30, 38, 40 visual, 178 repurposing, 7–8, 25, 27–30, 34, 36–8, 40, 43, 46, 48–50, 135, 185–6, 236, 238–40, 242 resemiotization, 2, 10, 13, 21, 29, 116, 139–45, 147, 151, 153–5, 207 see also semiotic remediation rhetoric, 8, 10, 17, 20–1, 55, 59, 85, 93–4, 112, 158, 184–7, 189–90, 195, 202–4 public, 184–5 risk, 145–8, 196–8, 205 communication, 184–5 S school, see institutional contexts semiotic, 1–8, 13–16, 18–20, 22, 25, 28–30, 54, 60, 79, 81–3, 86, 103, 109–10, 113–14, 116, 122, 123, 135–6, 138, 139–40, 142–3, 145, 154, 156–8, 179, 181, 185–6, 189, 206–11, 223, 227–8, 231, 233, 235–42


conversational, 20, 79–80, 107–12, 116–18, 134 discourse, 107–15, 118, 135, 138 practice, 83, 116, 135 spell, 20, 77, 79–87, 94, 98, 102–5 tellings, 20–1, 111–13, 115–19, 123–4, 127–9, 134–5, 137 see also representation – narrative nexus of practice, 13, 28, 48–9


Subject Index

semiotic – continued activity, 10, 54, 81–2, 103, 118, 236 practice, 1, 20, 189, 210, 226, 240 remediation, ix–xi, 1–3, 5–7, 10, 15–16, 18–22, 54–5, 60, 71, 74, 76, 79, 110–11, 116–18, 136, 139, 181–2, 184–7, 190, 195, 197, 202–3, 206–7, 211, 214, 219, 226, 228, 230–1, 233, 236–8, 240, 242 semiotics, 1–2, 5–7, 9, 14–22, 49, 86, 102, 104, 110, 112–13, 117–19, 135, 139–40, 153, 208, 210, 233, 237 shadow, 117, 124 acts, 5 chronotopes, 229–30 conversations, 4–5, 37, 116, 229, 232 narratives, 129 objects, 232 simulation, 21, 139, 141, 157–8, 165, 169–70, 173, 179–80 sociogenesis, 1, 3, 10, 13, 15–16, 49, 135, 186, 197, 202–3 sound, 7, 59, 63, 185, 206, 208, 213–14 spoken language, 118, 123, 129, 137, 145, 153, 191 see also oral; talk statement of goals and choices (SOGC), 59–60, 62–6, 68–9, 71, 73 system building, 55, 57–8 T talk, 3, 5–6, 8, 10, 12–14, 17–19, 21, 23, 29, 31, 37–8, 40, 45, 54, 59, 82, 87, 92, 98, 100, 103, 105, 108–9, 112–15, 119, 134, 136, 142–3, 157, 159, 168–77, 180, 186, 189, 191, 194–7, 202–3,

206–11, 217–19, 223, 226, 228–9, 231–3, 237 see also oral; spoken language task, 5, 20, 27, 30, 34, 41, 49, 55, 58–61, 68, 72–5, 93, 118, 157, 165, 167–74, 176, 178–9, 181, 191 text, 3–5, 7–8, 10–11, 13–14, 16, 18–23, 25, 27, 29, 31, 36–8, 40, 45–6, 50–1, 52–5, 59–61, 64–6, 68, 72, 80–2, 86, 104, 111–12, 115, 117, 124, 135, 144–5, 153, 156–61, 163–4, 169–70, 179–80, 185–6, 189–95, 198, 202, 205, 207, 214, 219, 223–4, 226, 230–4, 236–40 trajectories, ix–x, 1, 7, 10–11, 13, 18–21, 24–5, 28–30, 37–8, 40–5, 47, 49–51, 54, 103, 116–17, 129, 133–5, 141, 145, 147, 152–5, 207, 237 see also chains; semiotic – remediation transposition, 4, 9–10, 41, 115, 208, 233 tropes, 54, 74, 93, 143, 208, 227 tropic mapping and projection 11, 16 U universalization, 142–4, 154 utterance, 3, 14, 19, 93, 95, 98, 114, 119, 138, 172–6, 207, 223, 227 W workplace, see institutional contexts writing, 2, 5–6, 18–20, 24–7, 30, 38, 50–1, 52–5, 59, 64, 67–8, 78, 86, 89, 93, 103, 118, 129, 143, 168, 186–7, 190, 194–5, 208–11, 218, 231–3, 239–40, 242 as-artifact vs. as-activity, 18, 22, 209–11, 219, 223 co-present, 211, 226 see also inscription


270


Exploring Semiotic Remediation as Discourse Practice

Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice

Exploring Media Discourse (Hodder Arnold Publication)

Exploring Media Discourse (Hodder Arnold Publication)

Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music (Oxford Studies in Music Theory)

Practice Makes Perfect Exploring Writing

Dramatic Discourse: Dialogue as Interaction in Plays

Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method

The Semiotic Self

Language as discourse: perspectives for language teaching

Language as a Local Practice

Professional Learning as Relational Practice

The Yamas Niyamas: Exploring Yogas Ethical Practice

Exploring IBM SOA Technology & Practice

What is Nursing?: Exploring Theory and Practice (Transforming Nursing Practice)

Exploring Social Rights: Between Theory and Practice

Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches

Mediated Discourse: The Nexus of Practice

Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches

Cognitive Remediation Therapy for Schizophrenia: Theory and Practice

(De)mobilizing the Entrepreneurship Discourse: Exploring Entrepreneurial Thinking and Action

Discourse

Workplace Discourse (Continuum Discourse)

Remediation: understanding new media

Remediation: understanding new media

Physicochemical Groundwater Remediation

A Semiotic Theory of Language

Exploring Semiotic Remediation as Discourse Practice

Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice

Exploring Media Discourse (Hodder Arnold Publication)

Exploring Media Discourse (Hodder Arnold Publication)

Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music (Oxford Studies in Music Theory)

Practice Makes Perfect Exploring Writing

Dramatic Discourse: Dialogue as Interaction in Plays

Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method

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