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So what happens when we put modes
together?
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Well, behind it all is of course the notion of communication.
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I want to communicate something to you
I want to have,
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I have a meaning which I want you
to get in some way,
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And I have the sense that one mode alone won't do it. And so
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put modes together because I have a
sense that this mode will allow me to do
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this kind of thing best, and this mode
will allow me to do this other thing
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best. So for instance, on this website
that we have here, I can click on a
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particular thing and what I have is
something which is in time. There's a
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mode of moving image or little video
which is moving image and it's speech.
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Together these things are in time,
but at the same time, I have things which
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are not in time, bits of writing. So I have
things which are not in time and things
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which are and temporarily instantiated.
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I have an image, a still image, which is
spatial. And so because I want to say
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things which are about the things
which are in time, they move, things which
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are not in time, the stationary, things
which are spatially kind of displayed
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like images, I want to put all these
together because of the meaning that I
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want to make. So I have a sense
of what these things do,
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I have a sense of what I want to mean,
and so, I have a kind of an interest to make
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a composition in which certain kinds of things come together in a particular way that best
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exemplifies or communicates what I want to
mean.
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Okay.
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So, these modes are kind of arranged according to the interest
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I have as the person communicates, but also
my sense of who you are
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and what we might be most
interesting, most readily memorable...
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but most pleasurable, most informative
for you. So these, these things are sort
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of set in the communicational frame.
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So, you seem to suggest that different modes can do different kinds of things?
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Yes, and I suggested in part that it's me who makes the decision about which mode to use.
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There is also of course around me a
sort of conventional notion.
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I said for instance, if I'm kind of
communicating something very formally
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then writing might seem to be, because
my society tells me, the best means for doing that.
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It seems that we have, in our society, not
just these modes available to use, but
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also conventions that indicate to us not
as strict rules, nobody's going to get shot,
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but as rules, conventions to use
them in particular ways. And so we might
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say that writing over many hundreds of
years in literate societies has become specialized
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to be the carrier of certain kinds of
information. There's a functional specialization of writing
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and, also, also of course, then what happens
is a writing in that past which is now
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changing very rapidly, carried most of the informational load, so we can...we can ask, in a particular
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on this website, which mode is carrying
most informational load?
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So, if we look at this BBC News website,
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Yeah.
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We can talk about which of the different modes has the
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most functional specialization, or functional load?
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We can say which mode has been specialized for what kinds of purposes.
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Okay.
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Yeah, so, the writing next to the image seems
to be specialized to kind of make certain
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kinds of things in the image seem more salient.
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Mm-hmm
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Or, to give a context, a frame, for what this image actually
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is. That seems to be what writing is doing here. That's his specialization.
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Now, the question is, which of them carries more informational load?
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And, I would find that actually quite difficult to
answer because writing kind of frames,
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it provides an environment, it provides a
kind of a.. a background to the image.
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But the image seems most potent. And then
they're also organized in a kind of a
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left-right relationship. Yeah, the image
is on the left and the writing is on the right.
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So I'm asking myself, does that
matter? And, would it matter if the
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writing was on the left and the image on
the right? Now, these are the kinds of
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questions we now have to begin to think
about because we're making a composition
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in which everything that is there ought
to be where it should be in terms of
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further meanings I want to make.
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So, is this what we mean by layout then?
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In relation to the module we're just
looking at, we're looking at a module
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here of image and writing. And on the
website, it's quite near the top and it's
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on the... if this was sort of seen as two
columns really, it's in the left column
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that has a particular place there,
seemingly. If you kind of look at the
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website, you might come to that
first, especially to scroll down.
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You don't have to scroll down in order to
see that. So, something about the space
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has been used to make that most
prominent. It's what you come to first
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after you've got the BBC band at the top,
its first, it's on the left.
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In the West we're trained to read from
the left to the right, so we look there first,
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it's most prominent. Layout, the
possibility of putting things in space
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in a meaningful way, has been used to
make us attend to that before we attend
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to other kinds of things. We don't have
to scroll down. It's kind of prominently there.
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That's what we mean by layout.
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Is this related to... to if we talk about ordering?
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And, absolutely. For instance on this website,
as you can see, there's a...
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a smaller module, opposite in
the right column, and where this
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particular module about these soldiers
and the tank in the war in Afghanistan are.
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And a smaller and kind of thing and...
and somehow... and if you now imagined this
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smaller element being on the left and
the module about the war in Afghanistan
-
being on the right, intuitively, you might
think it would look unbalanced.
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It would, it would seem kind of odd. It
wouldn't seem quite right, so there is a
-
kind of thing about ordering which might
be both about significance, it might be
-
about a sort of a sense of a proper
composition in which
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things should be kind of balanced in terms of
a visual kind of firm ordering of them.
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And yes, that's what's all orderings about but
also the fact that as you scroll down,
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other things appear. Somebody has thought things which are less in importance
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can be lower in the in terms of scrolling down
on the website.
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So, the things which you mention earlier in the word "salient," so what they are assumed
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being more salient will be for example on the
left, topside?
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I would say so, yeah. So in the module,
the tank is on the left the
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writing is on the right. In these two columns,
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the item on the war in Afghanistan is on the left and the other item which I can't quite
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see what it's about, it's trailing something
in some other bit of program,
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is on on the right hand side. So there is a kind of a sense
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of which are the more significant spaces
on that screen.
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In Linguistics, were you two talking about
coherence and cohesion in a text.
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How can we use those terms when we're talking about Multimodality?
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The way that in my own understanding of Linguistics
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that's been used is that cohesion tells
you about the devices you use
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for making something coherent. And I think you can use that much in the same way here.
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You get a sense, for instance, if this screen was arranged in such a way
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that you say sometimes what's most, what seems to be most important
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is on the right, sometimes what's most important is on the left
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that would produce a sense of
lack of coherence. And the cohesive
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device of ordering in space would have
been not really fully used. But also if
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for instance, you had a color scheme
here, whether you kind of I don't know
-
what you call the BBC red there,
a maroon sort of firm red.
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Banner.
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In that banner. And if that
color.. it could be matched by
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other kinds of red's or pink's or green's or blue's and so then the sense of coherence
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of the page would be destroyed by kind
of an inconsiderate use of the mode of color.
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Yeah, so, there are devices here that produce the sense of yes, this belongs here.
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It is where it ought to be.
And this is where it ought to be and
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they are of various kinds. Its
positioning, it's.. there is something
-
coherent about the color that occurs
here, the... the color in the image of the
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tank isn't out of place in relation to
the maroon of the banner of the.. the
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yeah, so, I think one can transfer the notion
of firm cohesive devices, what are the
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means of making something coherent? And,
the notion of it is coherent it makes
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sense from the linguistic or from other
things to this. But we would have to sort
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of say it's no longer about
sentences in sequence or elements of
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sentences, which kind of link across from
sentence to sentence.
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But it's different.. different kinds of things. For instance in Linguistics,
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nobody would think about color as being a means for making something coherent.