Visual Rhetoric

There are now two Watson chapter demos with a cover page.

Here is the first screencast demo for the Watson chapter proposal. (I’ll put a link to these in the proposal; they’re too big to attach to it.)

It’s about 2MB, so it’ll take a while to load. When it’s loaded, I recommend putting the browser in full-screen mode, or at least maximized, so you can see the whole thing.

The first screen has a continue button (the arrow). After that, they’re all timed - just wait for them.

Here’s my list of likely bibliography entries for the Watson book chapter proposal:

Color Marketing Group. “Color Marketing Group.” 19 Mar 2008 <http://colormarketing.org/>.

Courtis, John K. “Colour as Visual Rhetoric in Financial Reporting.” Accounting Forum 28.3 (2004): 265-281.

Finlay, Robert. “Weaving the Rainbow: Visions of Color in World History.” Journal of World History 18 (2007): 383-431.

Franklin, A. et al. “Categorical Perception of Color Is Lateralized to the Right Hemisphere in Infants, but to the Left Hemisphere in Adults.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105.9 (2008): 3221-3225.

Joseph, Brandon W. “White on White.” Critical Inquiry 27 (2007): 90-121.

Kuehni, Rolf G. Color: An Introduction to Practice and Principles. Hoboken: J. Wiley & Sons, 2004.

Richards, Anne R., and Carol David. “Decorative Color as a Rhetorical Enhancement on the World Wide Web.” Technical Communication Quarterly 14.1 (2005): 31-48.

Romano, Andrew. “Stumper : Expertinent: Why the Obama “Brand” Is Working.” Newsweek 27 Feb 2008. 19 Mar 2008 <http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/stumper/archive/2008/02/27/how-obama-s-branding-is-working-on-you.aspx>.

Smith, Glenn S. “Human Color Vision and the Unsaturated Blue Color of the Daytime Sky.” American Journal of Physics 73.7 (2005): 590-597.

Taussig, Michael. “What Color is the Sacred?.” Critical Inquiry 33 (2006): 29-51.

Notes from our meeting on Sunday

• Proposal is 1-page abstract + short bibliography, and 1-page design document explaining how the “chapter” would work and what technologies it would use.
• Abstract can be based on original Watson talk proposal, edited to be somewhat more specific / include some more detail.
• For bibliography, we’d probably each pick 5-10 works that we’d be likely to cite in the chapter, out of the bibliographies we did for Danielle.
• With the proposal, include a URL for a short screencast, hosted on ideoplast.org, showing a couple of the conference demos.
• Editing the original Watson proposal into the chapter proposal: Can probably cut down the first paragraph (re type and color not discussed by rhetoricians) and add to the second (re what we’re going to do).

Two major claims for the piece:

• Type and color are important rhetorical techne
• A good way to analyze digital texts is to modify them and see what happens

Want to include:

• Material from presentation
• More theory about type and color as rhetoric
• Demos from presentation, as animated screencasts
• Interactive examples using Javascript (should work in all major browsers)
• The Greasemonkey scripts with instructions on installing and using them

Possible design: series of HTML pages with Javascript and embedded Flash (for screencasts, etc). Text should still be usable if Javascript and/or Flash are disabled. If Flash is available, it’d be nice to eg have the initial colors-and-fonts slide as a Flash movie with the text from the presentation scrolling along.

Michael Wojcik and Kristen Flory

We examine the rhetoric of typography and color in websites for 2008 presidential candidates, presenting rhetorical theories and actual and transformed pages from the sites.
Visual rhetoric is a well-established field with important conceptions of how rhetorical concepts apply beyond text (in the work of Trimbur, George, Hocks, Wysocki, and others). Work by design and usability scholars such as Brumberger and Schriver is also highly relevant to rhetoric and the “new work of composing” as well. While technology has made many visual elements widely available for rhetorical purposes, some of them—such as type and color—are largely absent from existing theories of visual rhetoric. Scholars across fields provide sophisticated understandings of these elements, but generally not in rhetorical terms (though Ehses, for example, has made this connection explicit).
We propose that type and color are rhetorical elements and we expand the conversation of visual rhetoric to place them within the discipline. To illustrate this, we examine their use in websites for 2008 presidential candidates as contributing to the arguments made by those sites. We propose rhetorical theories of type and color, drawing from classical and contemporary rhetoric and fields such as design, and illustrate them in an interactive visual presentation that demonstrates the effects of altering color and type.
For the chapter, we will use a series of HTML pages with embedded flash and javascript that will illustrate our theories in an interactive manner(we will also include an accessible version).

Include the scripts as part of the presentation so Firefox users can download and use them.

Bibliography

Ehses, Hanno and Lupton, Ellen. Design Papers Rhetorical Handbook. Nova Scotia: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1988.

Lupton, Ellen and Miller, Abbott. Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design. London: Phaidon Press, 1996.

Romano, Andrew. “Expertinent: Why the Obama ‘Brand’ is Working.” In http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/stumper (Newsweek blog). Posted February 27, 2008.

White, Jan V. Editing By Design: The Classic Guide to Wining Readers. 3rd Ed. New York: Allworth Press, 2003.

Brumberger, Eva R. “The Rhetoric of Typography: The Awareness and Impact of Typeface Appropriateness.” Technical Communication 50, no. 2 (2003): 224-230.

Helfand, Jessica. “Electronic Typography: The New Visual Language.” In Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World, edited by Carolyn Handa. 277-281. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004. First published in Looking Closer 2, edited by Michael Bierut, William Brenttel, Steven Heller, and D.K. Holland. (New York: All Worth Press, 1997). Originally published in Print. May/June 1994.

Schriver, Karen A. “What is Document Design?” In Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Text for Readers. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), 2-11.

Wysocki, Anne Frances. “The Multiple Media of Texts: How Onscreen and Paper Texts Incorporate Words, Images, and Other Media.” In What Writing Does and How it Does it, edited by Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior. 123-163. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004.

Wysocki, Anne Frances and Jasken, Julia I. “What Should Be an Unforgettable Face … .” Computers and Composition. 21 (2004): 29-48.