There’s an interesting article on an experiment being conducted at Fortune magazine. For anyone who’s not aware, the publishing industry is in a serious quandary and many publishers are struggling for survival. This explains why Fortune magazine has a multimodal media version of its print cover story available on the web. From the article by Andrew Vanacore on the Physorg.com site here,

Dispensing advice on finding a job during a recession, the piece had a soundtrack, a troupe of improv actors from Chicago and about 4,000 fewer words than your average magazine feature. Instead of scrolling through a column of text, readers (if the term can be applied) flipped through nine pages that told the story with a mix of text, photo-illustrations, interactive graphics and video clips.

I like that bit about “readers (if the term can be applied)” because I’ve been coming to the conclusion that with less and less text (think Twitter) that we may be returning to a more oral society as opposed to our still literate-dominant society. I’ve been thinking about this since some time in the early 1990’s when a communications professor (Paul Heyer) at Simon Fraser University first made the suggestion to us in class.

Following on this idea that we will be less and less text oriented, the work that Kay O’Halloran is doing at her Mulimodal Lab (situated at the National University of Singapore) casts an interesting light on where this all may be going with regard to science communication.  An associate professor in the Dept. of English Language and Literature, O’Halloran is speaking tomorrow (in Ottawa, Canada) at the 2009 Congress of Humanities and Social Science about reading, mathematics, and digital media. I hope there will be a webcast of her talk available afterwards (I suggested it to the folks from the Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing (CASDW) who are sponsoring her talk. If there is a webcast, I’ll post a link.

Meanwhile, for those of us not lucky enough to be there, from the programme,

To understand digital texts we need theories that study more than words alone. This talk will show how images, mathematical and scientific symbols, gestures, actions, music, and sound can all be studied along with words using examples from the classroom, digital media, and mathematics.

I believe that more and more of our communication, science and otherwise, is moving in a multimodal direction. It seems so obvious to me that it surprises me that it’s not commonly accepted wisdom.

Later this week, I will have more about science funding and I have notice of another sythetic biology event coming up at the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologie.