“Interaction of Author, Audience and Purpose…”

In reading “Interaction of Author, Audience, and Purpose in Multimodal Texts: Students’ Discovery of Their Role as Composer,” I was so happy to find hypertextual components, such as links within the text to specific documents. That was amazing! I had been hoping to find a document like this for some time, where textual evidence (such as student compositions, other relevant studies) is just a link away.

In fact, during last Spring’s TE 944, I had wished that Jory Brass’ article that we read, “Local Knowledge and Digital Movie Composing in an After- School Literacy Program” had had links to the videos that were described within. That article, which was published in The Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, can be found at: http://www.reading.org/Publish.aspx?page=/publications/journals/jaal/v51/i6/abstracts/jaal-51-6-brass.html&mode=redirect. This article described groups of students’ videos to some degree, but the message was not fully articulated without the videos that the students composed connecting the researcher with the students’ texts. Articles like this are misplaced in standard-format, print-based journals. They deserve a place in somewhere like Kairos, where the rich intertextuality of the works that are mentioned.

What was great about Powell, Alexander and Borton’s article, then, was that when the reader was connected enough to the particular piece that the author was describing, there was a link t it. This was particularly true when I was reading about Christina's video essay, and then again for Kasey's scrapbook page.

I was thinking of a way to publish my research, recently presented at The Ohio State University’s Hip-Hop Literacies Conference, to do it justice. The topic of my research was about teaching students rhetorical moves in digital composition using Nas and Damian Marley’s documentary, “The Next 48 Hours with Nas and Damian Marley.” The title of my presentation (which was sort of a co-presentation with April Baker-Bell, who talked about Jay-Z) was, “School of Hard Knocks: Jay-Z, Nas and Damian Marley Remix African American rhetoric(s), classical rhetoric and digital literacies.” The place for this sort of publication would appear to be somewhere like Kairos, where links can be inserted into the document itself. I was happy to have read this article, which not only showed a different way of publishing research but also introduced me to Kairos to a greater degree.