Multimodality/Museum

Carmen's interests are what I might characterize as building multimodal rhetorics, with her immediate project focusing on film trailers. She is working to inductively build a descriptive rhetorical framework that helps to show how trailers are persuasive and, in this way, quite different than the film genres they excerpt. She's worked with a production house in London to analyze trailers for comedies, incorporating painstaking coding (her data set included 1400+ frames of video) and interviewing in her analysis. She had just received the printed version of the dissertation, a milestone that I congratulated her in reaching!

Among other things, we talked about her data analysis methods and the way she turned Adobe Premiere into a qualitative data analysis tool for this project. I pointed her to the re-cut trailer for The Shining that had been circulating the blogosphere a few months back, and I sent a note introducing her to our very own Danielle Devoss, who is also interested in multimodality, film trailers, and other cool stuff.

And did I mention Carmen's advisor is Theo Van Leeuwen? And Gunther Kress will be one of her examiners for the defense? Yeah.

After a little more work time in the afternoon, Carmen and I visited ARoS, the museum of modern art here in Aarhus. Wow! What a great place. Great building.





Great collections.



I took a lot of pictures which you can see over at Flickr. Here's one of the better ones, a much larger-than-life but otherwise hyperreal sculpture called "Boy" by Ron Mueck.



Wednesday looks to be another exciting day. Writing in the morning, and a seminar with ASB faculty and students in the afternoon. I will be talking about the modeling knowledge work research that I have been doing with Clay Spinuzzi and Mark Zachry in some depth. The interesting thing will be exploring the intersecting syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis dimensions with this group because the disciplinary basis of much of the work that goes on here is Linguistics. I have always seen the connection between the Communication Event Models and the Genre Ecology Models and the work of Halliday, as they are attempts at modeling the function of discursive artifacts at various levels and with different attitudes (that is, research stances) toward discursive agency. Should be a great session!

Jeff arrives this afternoon, so Peter and I will meet him for an early dinner and a beer when he gets in. We hope to lay the groundwork for an article and/or some additional research that tries to differentiate an approach to "knowledge communication" that is distinct from and in some ways corrective of problematics in "knowledge management." Some key ideas from Peter's work include the drive to understand this work in terms of complex social relationships, something that overlaps nicely with Jeff's work too. My contribution includes the idea that at a micro-level, knowledge "work" is made up of communication events that produce and are mediated by textual artifacts. This suggests, also, a shift from information to something like the definition of "content" that I have proposed which is: "information and interactions that comprise the user experience." In any case, Peter, Jeff, and I all have data from previous projects that could be cross-analyzed for this argument, I think, and so it seems like an exciting proposition.