abstract

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theory

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multilinearity
visual rhetoric
theory in practice

references

Johanna Drucker (2002) sees this integration of textual and visual in hypertext as a form of configured language. For Drucker, the idea of configured language offers a way to explore the role of aesthetics in the production of meaning. In the case of hypertext, page layout, color palette, site organization, and link selection become aesthetic and structural elements that work together with, or "configure," the text to produce meaning. "Configuration factors into the effective production of substantive linguistic meaning in electronic documents" (Drucker, 2002, p.162). Remove the visual elements from the hypertext and some of the meaning is lost. Just how much meaning gets lost will likely depend on the extent to which the author has integrated the textual and the visual.

Mary Hocks (2003), in her formulation of a language of visual rhetoric, defines the integration of the textual and the visual as hybridity. Hybridity refers to "the ways in which online documents combine and construct visual and verbal designs" (p. 632). In addition to serving rhetorical purposes, combining the visual and the textual into a coherent whole can add texture to an academic hypertext (Bolter, 1998). Through configuration, the visual can actually become more than a decoration that adds "graphical weight to offset the pull of a text field" (Shauf, 2001, p. 34). With careful attention to this dimension of web development, the visual composition of a hypertext can become an important component of the message, and the text no longer carries all the meaning.

Visual rhetoric also calls attention to the spatial arrangement of an argument in a hypertext. Shauf (2001) proposes a visual rhetoric that includes what she calls a logic of space. "Once students become proficient in spatializing abstractions such as arguments, they ought to be able to draw again upon metaphor and analogy to build an electronic essay traversed by the user as a space" (Shauf, 2001, p. 34). Attention to the physical relationships between nodal elements of a hypertext is necessary if one is to effectively exploit the multilinear possibilities in hypertext.

visual rhetoric | integrating the visual | transparency

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