Development of multiple media documents

Development of documents in multiple media involves activities in three different fields, the technical, the discoursive and the procedural. The major development problems of artifact complexity, cognitive processes, design basis and working context are located where these fields overlap. Pending the emergence of a unified approach to design, any method must allow for development at the three levels of discourse structure, media disposition and composition, and presentation. Related work concerned with generalised discourse structures, structured documents, production methods for existing multiple media artifacts, and hypertext design offer some partial forms of assistance at different levels. Desirable characteristics of a multimedia design method will include three phases of production, a variety of possible actions with media elements, an underlying discoursive structure, and explicit comparates for review

Truth and falsehood for non-representationalists: Gorgias on the normativity of language

Sophists and rhetoricians like Gorgias are often accused of disregarding truth and rationality: their speeches seem to aim only at effective persuasion, and be constrained by nothing but persuasiveness itself. In his extant texts Gorgias claims that language does not represent external objects or communicate internal states, but merely generates behavioural responses in people. It has been argued that this perspective erodes the possibility of rationally assessing speeches by making persuasiveness the only norm, and persuasive power the only virtue, of speech. Against this view, I show how Gorgias’ texts support a robust normativity of language that goes well beyond persuasion while remaining non-representational. Gorgias’ claims that a speech can be persuasive and false, or true and unpersuasive, reveal pragmatic, epistemic, and agonistic constraints on the validity of speech that are neither representational nor reducible to sheer persuasiveness

Next steps in implementing Kaput's research programme

We explore some key constructs and research themes initiated by Jim Kaput, and attempt to illuminate them further with reference to our own research. These 'design principles' focus on the evolution of digital representations since the early nineties, and we attempt to take forward our collective understanding of the cognitive and cultural affordances they offer. There are two main organising ideas for the paper. The first centres around Kaput's notion of outsourcing of processing power, and explores the implications of this for mathematical learning. We argue that a key component for design is to create visible, transparent views of outsourcing, a transparency without which there may be as many pitfalls as opportunities for mathematical learning. The second organising idea is that of communication, a key notion for Kaput, and the importance of designing for communication in ways that recognise the mutual influence of tools for communication and for mathematical expression

Embodied cognitive ecosophy: the relationship of mind, body, meaning and ecology

The concept of embodied cognition has had a major impact in a number of disciplines. The extent of its consequences on general knowledge and epistemology are still being explored. Embodied cognition in human geography has its own traditions and discourses but these have become somewhat isolated in the discipline itself. This paper argues that findings in other disciplines are of value in reconceptualising embodied cognition in human geography and this is explored by reconsidering the concept of ecosophy. Criticisms of ecosophy as a theory are considered and recent work in embodied cognition is applied to consider how such criticisms might be addressed. An updated conceptualisation is proposed, the embodied cognitive ecosophy, and three characteristics arising from this criticism and synthesis are presented with a view to inform future discussions of ecosophy and emotional geography

Parenthetical 'I say (you)' in Late Medieval Greek vernacular: a message structuring discourse marker rather than a message conveying verb

In this paper, I argue that the first-person singular of the "ordinary" verb lambda epsilon gamma omega/lambda alpha lambda(omega) over tilde ('I say') in the thirteenth-to fourteenth-century political verse narratives Chronicle of Morea and War of Troy does not always carry its "normal", representational content ('I inform/assure [you]'). Frequently, lambda epsilon gamma omega/lambda alpha lambda(omega) over tilde structures the discourse rather than conveying conceptual meaning and, thus, has procedural meaning. In this respect, the verb can be compared to modern discourse markers (i.e., semantically reduced items which abound in spoken language). An important-yet not decisive-criterion to distinguish the conceptual from the procedural use is the position of lambda epsilon gamma omega/lambda alpha lambda(omega) over tilde: all "DM-like" examples are parenthetical. As for their precise pragmatic function, these forms are used, in particular, to signal a clarification towards the listener ("I mean") or, more generally, to grab the attention of the audience. Applied to the modern binary distinction between interpersonal and textual discourse markers, they thus belong to the former category. Finally, I tentatively relate the observation that the procedural parenthetical examples show a marked preference for pre-caesural position to the concept of "filled pauses", which makes sense given the adopted oral style of the Late Medieval Greek political verse narratives

Stylization and representation in subtitles: can less be more?

This article considers film dialogues and interlingual subtitles from the point of view of linguistic and cultural representation, and revisits from that perspective the question of loss, as a platform for considering alternative views on the topic and broader theoretical issues. The cross-cultural pragmatics perspective and focus on viewers’ reactions that dealing with representation entails cast the question of loss in a different light and opens up avenues for alternative modes of analysis. They make room for subtitles to be construed as producing their own systems of multimodal textual representation and modes of interpretation, and for their text to be recognised as having a greater expressive and representational potential than face values might suggest. This is the argument, informed by Fowler's Theory of Mode (1991, 2000), that is taken up in the paper, and harnessed to the review of examples or observations from recent studies on subtitles, and complementary evidence from dubbing. The capacity of subtitles to produce insights into the cultures and languages represented is of particular interest, and has wider implications for the culturally instrumental functions of subtitles and translation strategies

MAKING MEANING USING SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS AND VISUAL GRAMMAR ANALYSIS: COMPARISON OF SOURCE TEXT AND TARGET TEXT REFLECTED IN THE MAIN CHARACTER OF GRAPHIC NOVEL V FOR VENDETTA

This research presents a project designed to investigate a systemic way of analyzing metafunctions’ shifts between source texts and target texts using systemic functional linguistic (SFL) collaborated with visual grammar (VS; systemic functional approach for images). The study tries to examine the correlation between verbal and visual systems and how it affects the making of meaning in graphic novel. The research is descriptive qualitative with embedded case study. The data is acquired from monologue and dialogue uttered by main character of the first graphic novel book V for Vendetta. Content analysis, questionnaire and focus group discussion are conducted to obtain necessity data. The results shows there are shifts in transitivity structure, lexical items, and clauses' interdependency undergo ideational metafunction, modality system and discourse marker shifts undergo interpersonal metafunction, thematic structures, cohesion devices, physical presentation shifts undergo textual metafunction. Also shifts in target text caused by context of visual structure in representational metafunction and compositional metafunction. Those shifts demonstrate meaning changed in target text and can be identified in each metafunctions. The metafunction representational and ideational deal with interpreting content, form, context and symbolized expression in graphic novel. The shifts in transitivity structure and lexical items are caused by intertextuality and the theatricality in the content, form, context and symbolized expression of V for vendetta graphic novel. Interpersonal metafunction relates with enacting social relation. Whereas textual and compositional metafunction deal with organizing text/images, contextualizing the narrative scope and build reading order

Design as conversation with digital materials

This paper explores Donald Schön's concept of design as a conversation with materials, in the context of designing digital systems. It proposes material utterance as a central event in designing. A material utterance is a situated communication act that depends on the particularities of speaker, audience, material and genre. The paper argues that, if digital designing differs from other forms of designing, then accounts for such differences must be sought by understanding the material properties of digital systems and the genres of practice that surround their use. Perspectives from human-computer interaction (HCI) and the psychology of programming are used to examine how such an understanding might be constructed.</p

Textual Economy through Close Coupling of Syntax and Semantics

We focus on the production of efficient descriptions of objects, actions and events. We define a type of efficiency, textual economy, that exploits the hearer's recognition of inferential links to material elsewhere within a sentence. Textual economy leads to efficient descriptions because the material that supports such inferences has been included to satisfy independent communicative goals, and is therefore overloaded in Pollack's sense. We argue that achieving textual economy imposes strong requirements on the representation and reasoning used in generating sentences. The representation must support the generator's simultaneous consideration of syntax and semantics. Reasoning must enable the generator to assess quickly and reliably at any stage how the hearer will interpret the current sentence, with its (incomplete) syntax and semantics. We show that these representational and reasoning requirements are met in the SPUD system for sentence planning and realization.Comment: 10 pages, uses QobiTree.te