Multimedia  Inquiries

Experiments  in  Rhetorical  Analysis

John S. Nelson

Poroi, August, 2003

The structure of communications is so
fundamental to a society that when the
structure changes, everything is affected.¹
                                            — Stewart Brand

Only the art itself can discover its possibilities,
and the discovery of a new possibility is the
discovery of a new medium.²
                                                   — Stanley Cavell

Scholars study the whole world.  We explore every aspect that they can reach in one way or another.  Eventually we investigate any potentially important part from any promising angle in any medium that might be revealing.  Why should we expect to do all the learning in words?  Why should we endeavor to fit all the evidence into words, and words alone?

Well, we don’t exactly.  We realized long ago that we need numbers too.  Then we recognized that some charts and graphs and diagrams can do what even lists and tables cannot.  Gradually we diversified presentations and started attending to rhetorics of visual display for words as well as numbers.³  Never entirely absent from scholarship, figures and illustrations slowly became more prominent, especially as publication technologies diminished the costs in accommodating them.  As electronic technologies arrive, we adapt these avidly in research and teaching.  Telephone surveys, PowerPoint slides, audio files, video clips, and virtual-reality devices abound in labs and classrooms.  But where are their likes in scholarly publications?

Ay, there’s the rub:  for when it comes to going public with our work, we scholars know that scholarship must turn to words.  We might augment the words with a few figures, numerical or diagrammatical, but we know that the words must dominate.  Sciences assiduously measure sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches into numbers – then translate the numbers into words.  Humanities mostly dispense with the middle element.  Still their studies make even sculpture, painting, cinema, music, architecture, politics, aromas, sounds, gestures, textures, and more almost entirely into words.  Words are fine, words are wonderful, but why have them displace other modes possible for scholarly experience and communication?

Scholars love words, or at least they used to, before scholarly arts of writing and reading fell on hard times in an academy unduly enamored of jargon and boilerplate.⁴  But scholars also love what they study, else they would seldom study it well.  No scholars suppose that every good object of study has suddenly become words all the way down.  Nonetheless most conceptions of scholarship and practices of publication currently imply that every good inquiry transforms its object completely into words:  if not always for study then eventually for publication.  Does this denature what we love?  Does it shift what we study?  How could it not?

Yes, words are the stuff of theses, hypotheses, antitheses, analyses, exegeses, and such.  Yet even our words for demonstrations and evidence insist that these show us what is available for seeing.⁵  Similarly the investigatory words for audits and audiences suggest that these sound what is available for hearing.⁶  Electronic technologies already let us view and hear from afar – and in other ways that exceed unaided human sensoria.  Sometimes they augment our senses of touch, taste, and smell as well, although the Internet is not going there yet.  Is persuasion better when we cite or say what you could see as evidence, or when we show you?  At times, analysis can be more systematic when we enable scholars to listen for the effects from sounds, perhaps in films or speeches, than when we correlate counts of effects coded by a small team of researchers.  What if we open scholarship wide to non-verbal information, demonstration, and exposition?

Then we might develop modes of inquiry and publication for probing realities that resist representation in words.⁷  “If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” observes Stewart Brand, “invention is the sincerest form of criticism.”⁸  The time has come to invent and share inquiries in media beyond the verbal.  As scholarship, these usually will call on words but combine them with non-verbal media:  numbers and diagrams, to be sure, but also much more.  Online these days, an electronic journal can include photos, posters, sketches, simulations, animations, videos, movies, sound bites, sound effects, music, and myriad clips.  It can link to other sites rather than merely citing them.  It can demonstrate effects of sights and sounds instead of merely describing or counting them.  It can communicate the significance of interactions by simulating them, not just reporting correlations for them.  It can even sidestep the steep costs that keep scholars from publishing stills and illustrations to complement their words on paper.

The idea is for scholars to persuade one another through full-bodied experience as much as strictly intellectual assent.⁹  Thus the proposal is to conduct multimedia inquiries and publish multimedia scholarship.  Stanley Cavell explains that “a medium is something through which or by means of which something specific gets done or said in particular ways.  It provides, one might say, particular ways to get through to someone, to make sense; in art, they are forms, like forms of speech.”¹⁰  A computer animation can put a graph in motion.  An audio file online can bring a quotation to life, play a melody different ways for analysis, or sound out a mathematical relationship as a rhythm.  A video clip can be reworked to show in a second clip the impact of a shift from color to grayscale, a sharpening of edges for objects, or a shadowing of images.  Even fonts can be altered to show how print works on readers visually as well as verbally.¹¹

George Steiner contends that music has been eclipsing language in electronic cultures.¹²  Certainly scholars should make room for music in the conduct and publication of their inquiries.  With music notoriously difficult to translate into words, mere writing about music cannot suffice.  Analysis of lyrics is for the most part analysis of poetry:  perhaps reaching rhythm but ignoring pitch, melody, harmony, orchestration, performance, and more.  Some scholarship must happen in music and appear in music for us to learn adequately about music.

Still images have figured significantly in human affairs for many thousands of years.  If anything, technologies new to the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are increasing the human influence of images even as they proliferate the images themselves.¹³  The challenge is not merely that a picture is worth a thousand words, though economy is good for inquiry and communication.  We need multimedia inquiries because pictures operate differently than words, even within cognition and intellection.  We know that brain activity differs radically in location and pattern for words, pictures, and musics.  Were these aspects of the world somehow not to prove strikingly disparate in themselves, we nevertheless would know them in separate ways, necessitating multimedia scholarship for stitching them together into a comprehensible world.

Audiovisual media such as film and television have become enormously important for politics.¹⁴  The prominence of televised advertising is unmistakable in business and politics.¹⁵  There are many aspects of telespot persuasion susceptible to better study in audiovisual media than in print alone.¹⁶  The same goes for cultural mythmaking by the moving pictures and rich sounds of popular cinema.¹⁷  To learn the ways of electronic cultures is to supplement the print scholarship on television, film, and such with audiovisual research, instruction, and publication.  To do this, scholars must experiment with multimedia inquiries, and scholarly outlets such as Poroi must publish the instructive ones.  How else can scholars and publishers refine effective forms of multimedia scholarship?

To be sure, the present case for multimedia inquiries comes in printed words rather than moving pictures, computer simulations, or sound effects.  This is outreach, not self-contradiction.  The call for multimedia scholarship proposes that scholars supplement writing and speaking, not abandon them.  These words tell rather than show, but they do reference instances of multimedia scholarship, including several that the author has helped to generate.  In fact, this print evocation of multimedia scholarship responds to repeated suggestions that pioneers of the enterprise write about why others should follow suit.  These requests come from scholars intrigued by the efforts they have seen but curious to read written rationales for experimenting in kind.

Multimedia cases for multimedia inquiries can be more striking than written arguments, as Richard Lanham has shown.¹⁸  Yet some can be too dazzling for skeptical eyes, as well as too demanding for Internet capabilities in processing information.  So let this written call suffice to announce the interest of Poroi as an online journal in joining other media to multiply exemplars for multimedia scholarship.  Thomas Kuhn’s lesson for successful science holds here:  models for others to imitate and improve can be the key to developing multimedia inquiries.¹⁹  Still if you conclude from these words that showing multimedia inquiries would be better than simply telling about them, you accept the argument that the words are trying inadequately to advance.

Universities often diminish multimedia to a classroom concern; and some scholars act as though a respectable interest in multimedia stops with instruction.  For the classroom, too, there are holdouts.  The scholars who want all instruction – and not just their own – to stop with talk, text, and writing alone are hard to hear these days above the clamor for new technology and the click of computer mice.  But the folks who assume that electronic technology is only for the lab, the classroom, and the professional presentation are legion and vocal.  They mistake multimedia for mere communication of results once the actual inquiry has been conducted and digested.  Yet even for the hardest of sciences, rhetoric of inquiry shows that no communication is mere and all inquiry is rhetorical.²⁰  Inquiry changes in moving from one mode of communication to another, and that is why scholarship needs not only multimedia instruction but multimedia inquiry.

Multimedia are not just for teaching anymore.  Nor were they ever.²¹  Should scholars deny themselves the resources they extend to students?  “One of our issues as a society going forward,” maintains Steve Jobs, “is to teach kids to express themselves in the medium of their generation.  For the better part of the past century,” he notes, “the medium was the printed page, whether it was a newspaper or a novel.  People not only consumed; they authored.  When people read novels, they wrote letters.  The medium of our times is video and photography, but most of us are still consumers as opposed to being authors.”  Jobs observes that “the drive over the next 20 years is to integrate these multimedia tools to the point where people become authors in the medium of their day.”²²  Scholars who become authors in the many media of their day can come to better terms with the multimediated phenomena of their own or any other time.

Electronic times make worlds of new media.  These sometimes replace one another for particular tasks, but old media seldom fade away so much as they inflect and inform new media.  The new enfold the old even as the old embed themselves within.  Therefore Marshall McLuhan argued that old media become contents for new media.²³  Media supplement one another in the Derridean sense of added drops that change the chemistry of whole seas.²⁴  Multimedia are the solutions and dissolutions that result.  Multimedia inquiries need not invent whole new genres of scholarship.  More often they extend established forms into fresh media.  Augmenting the usual data in a research report with video clips can work that way.  On occasion, though, multimedia inquiries can shade over into the rhetorical inventions that innovate in form as well as content.

Especially for an online journal such as Poroi, multimedia inquiries complement verbal analysis with visual and aural analysis.  With political ads, for example, it is possible for scholars to use equipment akin to that used by ad-makers.  We are moving toward a similar situation for television production and even some film-making.  A difference for now, however, is that the Internet can handle short videos such as telespots at thirty or sixty seconds – at least in frames that occupy only a part of the screen.  Reliable streaming for significantly longer or full-screen videos currently exceeds online capacities.  The challenge to multimedia scholarship is to turn such limits, however momentarily, into advantages.  “To discover ways of making sense,” says Cavell, “is always a matter of the relation of an artist to his art, each discovering the other.”²⁵  Kathleen Jamieson has argued that frames and partial screens tend to distance viewers from the full involvement in videos that keep their capacities for critical analysis from being activated.²⁶  In the same vein, G. R. Boynton’s multimedia inquiries frame fairly small videos.  They use the rest of the screen for prominent words.  The words reinforce audience memory of Boynton’s voiceover comments and activate audience analysis of what people experience on the screen.²⁷

Limits impose trade-offs.  Hyperlinks are among the glories of the World Wide Web, and multimedia scholarship online can make great use of them.²⁸  Links can help scholars experience other relevant sites for demonstrations, explanations, implications, counter-arguments, and more.  Nonetheless ejournals that aspire to sustained availability must cope with the transience of other sites.  A fine link today can go nowhere tomorrow.  Poroi’s initial strategy is to incorporate in its own site the linked materials that ordinarily might appear elsewhere on the Web.  Then the links will keep working as long as Poroi stays available from the University of Iowa Libraries, which have become its publisher and archivist specifically to make its issues permanently accessible on the Web.  The obvious trade-off is that an online journal such as Poroi may not be able to embed all desired links within its site or rely on indefinite caching by a search engine such as Google.  Consequently some multimedia scholars might need to work with the journal editors to learn about particular limits and invent appropriate alternatives.  There are no general reasons for online and other limits to prevent or even impede multimedia scholarship.

Print scholarship faces limits of its own, of course, limits that invite multimedia inquiries in response.  Yet two concerns come easily to mind.  One is that multimedia scholarship would merge seamlessly with educational – let alone entertainment – television, radio, cinema, or the like as we already know them.  In other words, the first concern is that multimedia scholarship would turn scientific researchers into public intellectuals or popular entertainers.  The second concern runs in the opposite direction.  It worries that academic agendas of multimedia scholars would warp their media, as well as their performances, in unfortunate ways.  Scholars know how academic enactments are claimed to become caricatures of the real things:  might their products become neither fish nor fawn but plenty foul?  Academic productions, a counter-argument goes, incline to be cute, precious, and avant-garde past the point of perversity.  Or they tend to merge into amateur and plodding performances exceeded in almost every way by professional work.

These are real possibilities, but probably not across the board.  Set aside such recurrent questions as whether the polity might need more public intellectuals or the academy might need more entertaining teachers.  Good or bad, neither of these developments is any more inevitable than earnest mediocrity or avant-garde obscurity.  The pivotal challenge is that the enterprise, in whatever media, primarily be scholarship.  What counts as good or bad, mediocre or obscure, will be refined and judged by scholarly communities of inquiry rather than television ratings or box-office receipts.  Scholars have long known a great deal about assessing nascent inquiries and improving them through commentary, competition, and collaboration within their communities.²⁹

Multimedia scholarship must pursue academic agendas that serve learning.  At times this might produce goods of popular, entertaining kinds.  More often it should produce goods of the narrower, critical kinds that we associate with the avant-garde or the elite tastes of high culture.  But mainly it should produce goods of different, distinctively academic kinds.  The multimedia analysis of political ads might occasionally take forms akin to those of a PBS documentary or an A&E “Investigative Report.”³⁰  Once in a blue moon, a multimedia analysis of “Ronald Reagan, the Movie” might even appear as a 60 Minutes segment on CBS.³¹  Far more often, and usually far more accomplished according to standards apt for scholarship, multimedia analysis of music, computer games, films, ads, and more ought to invent and improve its own genres.  These will be scholarly rather than low-brow or high-brow or what-have-you.  And they will be learning about phenomena, effects, performances, genres, and media that reach ever more aspects of our world.

© John S. Nelson, 2003.

Notes

¹     Stewart Brand, The Media Lab, New York, Viking Press, 1987, p. xiii.

²     Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed, New York, Viking Press, 1971, p. 32.

³     See Edward R. Tufte:  The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Cheshire, CT, Graphics Press, 1983; Envisioning Information, Cheshire, CT, Graphics Press, 1990; Visual Explanations, Cheshire, CT, Graphics Press, 1997.

⁴     See Charles Bazerman and James Paradis, eds., Textual Dynamics of the Professions:  Historical and Contemporary Studies of Writing in Professional Communities, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.  Also see James Crosswhite, The Rhetoric of Reason:  Writing and the Attractions of Argument, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.

⁵     See John S. Nelson, Tropes of Politics, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1998, pp. 123-124.

⁶     See John S. Nelson, “Account and Acknowledge, or Represent and Control?  On Postmodern Politics and Economics of Collective Responsibility,” Accounting, Organizations and Society, 18, 2-3, February-April, 1993, pp. 207-229.

⁷     See Elaine Scarry, Resisting Representation, New York, Oxford University Press, 1994.

⁸     Stewart Brand, The Media Lab, New York, Viking Press, 1987, p. 7.

⁹     See John S. Nelson and G. R. Boynton, Video Rhetorics, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1997, pp. 195-232.

¹⁰   Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 32.

¹¹    See Richard A. Lanham, The Electronic Word, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993.

¹²    See George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1971.

¹³    See Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images, Sydney, Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1987; John Hartley, The Politics of Pictures, London, Routledge, 1992; Kiku Adatto, Picture Perfect, New York, Basic Books, 1993.

¹⁴    See John Hartley, Tele-ology:  Studies in Television, London, Routledge, 1992; Doris A. Graber, Processing Politics:  Learning from Television in the Internet Age, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001.

¹⁵    See Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images, New York, Basic Books, 1988; Anne Norton, Republic of Signs, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993.

¹⁶    See Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dirty Politics, New York, Oxford University Press, 1992; G. R. Boynton, The Art of Campaign Advertising, Chatham, NJ, Chatham House, CD-ROM, 1996; G. R. Boynton and John S. Nelson, Hot Spots:  Multimedia Analyses of Political Ads, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, videotape, 1997.

¹⁷    See John S. Nelson:  “Argument Without Truth:  Hannah Arendt on Political Judgment and Public Persuasion,” Argument in a Time of Change, James F. Klumpp, ed., Annandale, VA, National Communication Association, 1998, pp. 40-45; “Argument by Mood in War Movies:  Postmodern Ethos in Electronic Media,” Argument at Century’s End, Thomas A. Hollihan, ed., Annandale, VA, National Communication Association, 2000, pp. 262-269.  Also see John S. Nelson and G. R. Boynton:  “Making Sound Arguments:  Would a Claim by Any Other Sound Mean the Same or Argue So Sweet?” Argument in a Time of Change, pp. 12-17; “Arguing War:  Global Television against American Cinema,” Arguing Communication and Culture, G. Thomas Goodnight, ed., Washington, DC, National Communication Association, 2002, pp. 571-577.

¹⁸    See Richard A. Lanham, “Classical Rhetoric and Digital Multimedia,” Rhetoric Symposium on Refiguring the Human Sciences – New Practices of Inquiry, Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry, Iowa City, IA, June 22-24, 1995.

¹⁹    See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, (1962), second edition, 1970; Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1970.

²⁰    See John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and D. N. McCloskey, eds., The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1987; Arjo Klamer, D. N. McCloskey, and Robert M. Solow, eds., The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1988; Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge:  The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1988; Herbert W. Simons, ed., Rhetoric in the Human Sciences, Newbury Park, CA, Sage, 1989; Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Representation, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1989; Herbert W. Simons, ed., The Rhetorical Turn, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990; Jack Seltzer, ed., Understanding Scientific Prose, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1993; Charles Alan Taylor, Defining Science:  A Rhetoric of Demarcation, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1996; Jeffrey Cox and Shelton Stromquist, eds., Contesting the Master Narrative, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 1998; Celeste Michelle Condit, The Meanings of the Gene, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.

²¹    See G. R. Boynton and Sheila D. Creth, eds., New Technologies and New Directions, Westport, CT, Meckler, 1993.

²²    Steve Jobs, “The Classroom of the Future,” Newsweek, 137, 18, October 29, 2001, p. 60.

²³    See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1964, pp. 7-21.

²⁴    See Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, Alan Blass, tr., Chicago, University of Chicago Press, (1967), 1978.  Also see William Corlett, Community without Unity, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1989.

²⁵   Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 32.

²⁶    See Kathleen Jamieson, “Broadcast Ad Watches,” Annenberg School Conference for Journalists, Washington, DC, C-SPAN, 1992; Everything You Think You Know about Politics . . . and Why You’re Wrong, New York, Basic Books, 2000, pp. 121-122; Darrell M. West, Air Wars:  Television Advertising in Election Campaigns, 1952-2000, Washington, DC, CQ Press, third edition, 2001, pp. 86-87.

²⁷    See Boynton, The Art of Campaign Advertising; Boynton and Nelson, Hot Spots.

²⁸    See Theodor Holm Nelson, Literary Machines, Sausalito, CA, Mindful Press, 1990.

²⁹    See Norwood Russell Hanson, Patterns of Discovery, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1965; Diana Crane, Invisible Colleges, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1972; Paul K. Feyerabend, Against Method, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities Press, 1975; Steve Fuller, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.

³⁰    See Michael Davis (producer) and Bill Curtis (narrator), “The Living Room Campaign,” Arts & Entertainment Network, 1992; Bill Moyers (interviewer), “Dirty Campaigning,” PBS, The Bill Moyers Show, 1992; Bernard Kalb (interviewer), “Mudslinging and the Media,” CNN, Reliable Sources, October 30, 1994; Ron Faucheux (organizer), “Ad Strategies in 1996 Elections,” Campaigns and Elections Magazine panel on C-SPAN, June 7, 1996.

³¹    The segment was inspired by Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987.