Category Archives: multimodal discourse

Teaching nano the haptic way; Brownian motion ain’t what we thought; EPA issues final new rules for carbon nanotubes

Leave a reply

In keeping with my interest in the multimodal communication of science, I have found a slide show about teaching nanotechnology using haptics here. The technique is intended for the visually impaired but as the authors point out visual contact at the nano scale is impossible. So, everyone, visually impaired or not, makes haptic contact with material at the nano scale with the consequence that the teaching technique is suitable for everybody.

As suggested in my July 27, 2009 blog posting (part 4 of the robots and human enhancement series), developments such as these suggest that the notion of physical impairment may change significantly or disappear.

In a media release, on the Azonano site, detailing new revelations about Brownian motion,  Steve Granick, Founder Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois, describes how many of us are taught about Brownian motion,

“In high school science classes, students are often assigned the task of using a microscope to watch a particle of dust sitting in a drop of water,” Granick said. “The dust particle seems alive, moving back and forth, never in the same way. The motion of the dust particle is caused by the random ‘kicks’ of surrounding water molecules.”

Granick goes on to describe what he and his researchers have observed,

“Like Einstein, we used to think we could describe Brownian motion with a standard bell-shaped curve,” Granick said. “But now, with the ability to measure very small distances much more precisely than was possible 100 years ago, we have found that we can have extremes much farther than previously imagined.”

Please do take a look at the story on the Azonano site for more about the significance of this discovery.

Nanowerk News has posted a media release from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) about new rules which allow for commercialization of carbon nanotubes under limited conditions.  The EPA document is here and pages 9 (multi-walled carbon nanotubes) and 10 (single-walled nanotubes) are the relevant pages.

Visualizing innovation and the ACS’s second nanotube contest

Leave a reply

I’ve found more material on visualizing data, this time the data is about innovation. An article by Cliff Kuang in Fast Company comments on the WAINOVA (World Alliance for Innovation) and its interactive atlas of innovation. From the article,

Bestario, a Spanish infographics firm, designs Web sites that attempt to find new relationships in a teeming mass of data. Sometimes, the results are interesting, as examples, if nothing else, of data porn; other times, it’s merely confounding. Its new project is a great deal easier to explain: The Wainova World Atlas of Innovation attempts to map the world’s major science and business incubators, as well as the professional associations linking them.

Kuang goes on to point out some of the difficulties associated with visualizing data when you get beyond using bar graphs and pie charts. The atlas can be found here on the WAINOVA site. If you’re interested in looking at more data visualization projects, you can check out the infosthetics site mentioned in Kuang’s article.

Rob Annan at the Don’t leave Canada behind blog has picked up on an article in the Financial Post which, based on an American Express survey, states that Canadian business is being very innovative despite the economic downturn. You can read Annan’s comments and get a link to the Financial Post article here. As for my take on it all, I concede that it takes nerve to keep investing in your business when everything is so uncertain but I agree with Annan (if I may take the liberty of rephrasing his comment slightly) there’s no real innovation in the examples  given in the Financial Post article.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) has announced its second nano video contest. From the announcement on Azonano,

In our last video contest “What is Nano?”, you showed us that nano is a way of making things smaller, lighter and more efficient, making it possible to build better machines, solar cells, materials and radios. But another question remains: how exactly is “nano” going to impact both us and the world? We want you to think big about nano and show us how nano will address the challenges we face today.

The contest is being run by ACS Nanotation NanoTube. There’s a cash prize of $500USD and submissions must be made between July 6, 2009 and August 9, 2009.  (Sorry, I kept forgetting to put this up.) You must be a registered user to make a submission but registration is free here. The Nano Song (complete with puppets!) that was making the rounds a few months ago was a video submission for the first contest.

Elsevier has announced a new project, the Article of the Future. The beta site is here. From the announcement on Nanowerk News,

Elsevier, a leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announces the ‘Article of the Future’ project, an ongoing collaboration with the scientific community to redefine how a scientific article is presented online. The project takes full advantage of online capabilities, allowing readers individualized entry points and routes through content, while exploiting the latest advances in visualization techniques.

Yes, it’s back to visualization and, eventually, multimodal discourse analysis and one of the big questions (for me) how is all this visualizing of data going to affect our knowledge? More tomorrow.

Alberta welcomes a new nanotechnology product and research centre plus some news on a kissing phone

2 Replies

The new facility will be called the Hitachi Electron Microscopy Products Development Centre (HEMiC) at Canada’s National Institute of Nanotechnology (NINT) at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. From the media release (on Azonano),

“Alberta’s strength in nanotechnologies, and the province’s coordinated strategy for nanotechnology made our decision to seek a partnership here easy,” said John Cole, President of Hitachi High-Technologies Canada, Inc. “This initiative engages Hitachi with Alberta’s nanotechnology community at the leading edge of research while contributing to commercial opportunities.”

…

The Centre will house three new electron microscopes valued at $7 million, including the first-ever Hitachi environmental transmission electron microscope Model H-9500 in operation outside of Japan.

There are many quotes in the media release, surprisingly, none from Dr. Nils Petersen, NINT’s  Director General.

Fast Company is featuring an article by Kit Eaton about phones that won’t require buttons for control (more touch screen-type technology but introducing a new level of innovation). As it turns out, these phones will be coming from Nokia. Kissing the phone as a gesture that you want to contact a loved is just one of the ideas being explored. More here including a Nokia video about the project. The product designers are looking at how people gesture and, depending on your culture, the meaning behind gestures can vary greatly as the Nokia designer notes in the video. Anyway, this type of project relates to my interest in multimodal discourse and my suspicion that we won’t be writing (or for the matter reading) as much as we do now.

Rob Annan over at Don’t leave Canada behind has picked up on my series of last week’s about innovation in Canada, in his posting Canada not simply hewers and drawers.

Science’s exquisite corpse and other interesting science communication developments

2 Replies

The ‘exquisite corpse’ is a game that surrealists started playing in the earlyish part of the 20th century, according to the wikipedia essay here. I first came across the game in a poetry context. I was part of an online poetry organization and someone suggested (as I recall) that we start an exquisite corpse project on our website. Nothing much of came of it but I’ve always found the phrase quite intriguing. The idea is that a group of people play with words or images individually then put the pieces together to construct a final work.

Andrew Maynard’s 2020 Science blog has been featuring an art/science exquisite corpse project by Tim Jones. Billed as an experiment in science engagement, Jones and his colleagues (at the Imperial College) have created videos of two  members of the public, a science communicator, and a scientist talking about a drawing they’ve each created that expresses what they each think is important abou science.  What you’ll see are the interviews, the pictures that the people drew, and an exquisite corpse of science, if you go here.

Tim Jones has now invited more people to participate for the biggest art/science project in history (maybe) to create a bigger exquisite corpse of science. If you’re interested go here to Tim Jones’s site or you can read about it here at 2020 Science.

I came across a way for scientists to publish workflows and experiment plans  at myExperiment.

BBC4 has been conducting an experiment of their own, visualising radio. In this case, it’s a science show that’s cast over the internet. They’ve blogged about the project here.

All of this makes me think back to the interview that Kay O’Halloran (July 3, 6, and 7, 2009 postings) gave me on multimodal discourse analysis and Andrew Maynard’s bubble charts (June 24 and 29, 2009). It’s exciting to explore these new and rediscovered techniques and to think about how we perceive the information being conveyed to us.

One last bit, there’s been an announcement from Lord Drayson, UK’s Science and Innovation Minister and Chair of Ministerial Group on Nanotechnologies that the government is seeking advice for a national nanotechnology strategy. From the announcement on Nanowerks News,

Industry, academia and consumer groups were invited to use a new website to help develop the strategy, building on and consolidating the existing research and consultations that have already taken place. The website will gather views on core issues including research, regulation, innovation and commercialisation, measurement and standards and information as well as on the anticipated impact of nanotechnologies on a wide range of sectors. The aim of the strategy is to describe the actions necessary to ensure that the UK obtains maximum economic, environmental and societal benefit from nanotechnologies while keeping the risks properly managed.

The rest of the announcement is  here and the project website is here.  (NOTE: Consumer groups will have their own website although members of the public are welcome the new website is really intended for academia, industry, and NGOs.)

Happy weekend!

The other side of the multimodal discourse coin

1 Reply

Bill Thompson has an article, Giving life a shape, on BBC News which touches tangentially on approaching the world in a multimodal fashion. He takes a kind of digital approach i.e.when he uses the word technology he actually means digital technology and his examples come from social networking, Second Life, social gaming and other activities mediated through the Internet and computers. From the article,

… because in working through the creative potential of new technologies artists of all types are helping us to find new ways to think about these tools and working out how to integrate them into our wider cultural and commercial practice.

They are helping us to explore the latest chapter in the ongoing conversation between human psychology and the capabilities of modern technology, something which will matter more and more as the network becomes pervasive and digital devices penetrate every area of our lives.

Different modalities (audio files, graphics files, animation (Second Life), and others are referred to indirectly in the course of Thompson’s article, which is why I’ve picked up on it. In  light of the Kay O’Halloran interviews (on this website blog July 3, 6, and 7, 2009) Thompson’s description of how “artists help find us new ways to think about things” reveals the other side of the multimodal discourse coin.

While O’Halloran and her colleagues develop a framework for analyzing and understanding multimodal discourse, it’s artists (I define that word broadly) who enact and explore that discourse through their work.

One quibble, I think Thompson’s definition could be broadened so that technology  includes nanotechnology, biotechnology, synthetic biology and other emerging technologies. Now back to Thompson and a comment that works no matter how you define technology,

One problem in talking about this is that relatively few people understand the underlying technology sufficiently well to be comfortable with it. We have few stories that talk about technology and few workable metaphors or analogies that let us convey complex technological issues in ways that people really grasp.

Metaphors came up in the O’Halloran interview (July 6, 2009 posting) too and I got this in the comments (from inkbat),

I was struck by the point on metaphor. When you come right down to it, isn’t it sad that so many of our concepts are the result of some designer or advertiser or whoever deciding to create some kind of shortcut for us .. which would work if it was just in the one instance but then it takes on a life of its own and suddenly we no longer think of the heart AS IF it is a pump but as though it IS a pump. Or the brain as a computer. …

Unfortunately as inkbat points out, we forget we’ve created a metaphor and we treat it ‘as if it were so’ to results that can be disastrous. Still, I think that creating metaphors and then having to ‘break’ or ‘see through’ them ultimately discarding the old metaphor and developing a new one is part of the human condition.

Back to my nanotech ways tomorrow.

Kay O’Halloran interview on multimodal discourse: Part 3 of 3

Leave a reply

Thanks to Kay O’Halloran for kindly giving me this interview and here’s the last part which also includes a bibliography.

3. I notice that you have a project examining PowerPoint in the classroom and in corporate settings which you are conducting for the Australian Research Council. Could you explain a little bit about the project?

The project ‘Towards a Social Theory of Semiotic Technology: Exploring PowerPoint’s Design and its Use Higher Education and Corporate Settings awarded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) (Discovery Grant No. DP09889939) is a collaborative project between Chief Investigator Professor Theo van Leeuwen (Dean for Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney), Dr Emilia Djonov (Post-doctoral Fellow, University of Technology, Sydney) and myself. The following description of the project is drawn from our research proposal.

PowerPoint has become the dominant technology for designing and delivering presentations, particularly in education and business settings where success often depends on skills in the use of the application. Powerpoint is the subject of much debate and it creates strong reactions, both positive and negative. It’s either praised for increasing presenters’ confidence and eloquence (e.g. Gold 2002) or it’s condemned for limiting users’ ability to present complex ideas through an over-simplification of information presented in bullet points, linear slide-by-slide formats and illegible graphics (e.g. Tufte 2003).

From the multimodal perspective, Powerpoint is a semiotic technology which has a range of options (i.e. grammar) from which presenters make selections with regards to the linguistic text, images, animations and sounds. There are default themes which the presenter may choose as well. These choices integrate in multimodal presentations which are recontextualised by the speaker during the presentation. Most studies of Powerpoint adopt a different approach, however, by either exploring lecturers’ and students’ perceptions of PowerPoint to support learning, or alternatively they are experimental studies which investigate the effects of PowerPoint versus transparency-supported lectures on learning.

Our project adopts a multimodal approach to (a) conceptualise the grammar of Powerpoint through the study of its systems of meaning; (b) analyse and compare the choices which are made in higher education and corporate settings; and (c) investigate how these choices are contextualised in presentations. In this way, we will explore how the design of PowerPoint supports or hinders the achievement of the various goals of the presenters. At the moment, there are no studies which investigate differences in the use of Powerpoint across educational and corporate settings, and furthermore, there is no evidence for arguments that PowerPoint cannot support the representation of knowledge in technical disciplines such as engineering (Tufte, 2003) or the rich narrative and interpretative skills required for social science disciplines (Adams, 2006), nor is there evidence that PowerPoint has introduced corporate rhetoric into educational practices (Turkle, 2004). In addition, the study will provide guidelines for evaluating and improving the design and use of PowerPoint and other similar presentation software.

Bibliography

Adams, C. (2006). PowerPoint, habits of mind, and classroom culture. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 38(4), 389 – 411.

Gold, R. (2002). Reading PowerPoint. In N. J. Allen (Ed.), Working with words and images: New steps in an old dance. (pp. 256-270). Westport, Connecticut: Ablex.

Tufte, E. R. (2003). The cognitive style of PowerPoint (2nd edition). Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphics Press.

Turkle, S. (2004). The fellowship of the microchip: global technologies as evocative objects. In M. Suárez-Orozco & D.B. Qin-Hilliard (Eds.), Globalization: Culture and Education in the New Millennium (pp. 97-113). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Kay O’Halloran interview on multimodal discourse: Part 2 of 3

4 Replies

Before going on to the second part of her interview, here’s a little more about Kay O’Halloran. She has a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from Murdoch University (Australia), a B.Sc. in Mathematics and a Dip. Ed. and B.Ed. (First Class Honours) from the University of Western Australia.

The Multimodal Analysis Lab of which she is the Director brings together researchers from engineering, the performing arts, medicine, computer science, arts and social sciences, architecture, and science working together in an interdisciplinary environment. (This is the first instance where I’ve seen the word interdisciplinary and can wholeheartedly agree with its use. As I have found, interdisciplinary can mean that an organic chemist is having to collaborate with an inorganic chemist or an historian is working with an anthropologist. I understand that there are leaps between, for example, history and anthropology but by comparison with engineering and the performing arts, the leap just isn’t that big.)

There’s more on Kay O’Halloran’s page here and more on the Multimodal Analysis Lab here.

2. Could you describe the research  questions, agendas and directions that are most compelling to you at this  time?

Multimodal research involves new questions and problems such as:

– What are the functionalities of the resources (e.g. language versus image)?

– How do choices combine to make meaning in artefacts and events?

– What types of reconstruals take place within and across semiotic artefacts and events and what type of metaphors consequently arise?

– How is digital meaning expanding our meaning-making potential?

The most compelling agendas and directions in multimodal research include developing new approaches to annotating, analysing, modeling, and interpreting semiotic patterns using digital media technologies, particularly in dynamic contexts (e.g. videos, film, website browsing, online learning materials). The development of new practices for multimodal analysis (e.g. multimodal corpus approaches) means we can investigate social cultural patterns and trends and the nature of knowledge and contemporary life in the age of digital media, together with its limitations. Surely new media offers us the potential for new research paradigms and making new types of meanings which will lead us to new ways of thinking about the world. Also, multimodal approaches offer the promise of new paradigms for educational research where classroom and pedagogical practices and disciplinary knowledge can be investigated in their entirety. Multimodal research opens up a new exciting world, one which is being eagerly embraced by academic researchers and postgraduate students as the way forward (in my experience at least).

Kay O’Halloran interview on multimodal discourse: Part 1 of 3

3 Replies

I am thrilled to announce that Kay O’Halloran an expert on multimodal discourse analysis has given me an interview. She recently spoke at the 2009 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Ottawa as a featured speaker (invited by the Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing). Kay is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore and she is the Director of the Multimodal Analysis Lab. (more details about Kay in future installments)

Before going with the introduction and the interview, I want to explain why I think this work is important. (Forgive me if I gush?) We have so much media coming at us at any one time and it is increasingly being ‘mashed up’, remixed, reused, and repurposed. How important is text going to be when we have icons and videos and audio materials to choose from? Take for example, the bubble charts on Andrew Maynard’s 2020 blog which are a means of representing science Twitters. How do you interpret the information? Could they be used for in-depth analysis? (I commented earlier about the bubble charts on June 23 and 24, 2009 and Maynard’s post is here. You might also want to check out the comments where Maynard explains few things that puzzled me.)

As Kay points out in her responses to my questions, we have more to interpret than just a new type of chart or data visualization.

1. I was quite intrigued by the title of your talk (A Multimodal Approach to Discourse Studies: A paradigm with new research questions, agendas and directions for the digital age) at the 2009 Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences held in Ottawa, Canada this May. Could you briefly describe a multimodal approach for people who aren’t necessarily in the field of education?

Traditionally, language has been studied in isolation, largely due to an emphasis on the study of printed linguistic texts and existing technologies such as print media, telephone and radio where language was the primary resource which was used. However, various forms of images, animations and videos form the basis for sharing information in the digital age, and thus it has become necessary to move beyond the study of language to understand contemporary communicative practices. In a sense, the study of language alone was never really sufficient because analysing what people wrote or said missed significant choices such as typography, layout and the images which appeared in the written texts, and the intonation, actions and gestures which accompanied spoken language. In addition, disciplinary knowledge (e.g. mathematics, science and social science disciplines) involves mathematical symbolism and various kinds of images, in addition to language. Therefore, researchers in language studies and education are moving beyond the study of language to multimodal approaches in order to investigate how linguistic choices combine with choices from other meaning-making resources.

Basically multimodal research explores the various roles which language, visual images, movement, gesture, sound, music and other resources play, and the ways those resources integrate across modalities (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory etc) to create meaning in artefacts and events which form and transform culture. For example, the focus may be written texts, day-to-day interactions, internet sites, videos and films and 3-D objects and sites. In fact, one can think of knowledge and culture as specific choices from meaning-making resources which combine and unfold in patterns which are familiar to members of groups and communities.

Moreover, there is now explicit acknowledgement in educational research that disciplinary knowledge is multimodal and that literacy extends beyond language.

The shift to multimodal research has taken place as a result of digital media which not only serves as the object of study, but also because digital media technologies offer new research tools to study multimodal texts. Such technologies have become available and affordable, and increasingly they are being utilised by multimodal researchers in order to make complex multimodal analysis possible. Lastly, scientists and engineers are increasingly looking to social scientists to solve important problems involving multimodal phenomena, for example, data analysis, search and retrieval and human computer interface design. Computer scientists and social sciences face similar problems in today’s world of digital media, and interdisciplinary collaboration is the promise of the future in what has become the age of information.

Have a nice weekend. There’ll be more of the interview next week, including a bibliography that Kay very kindly provided.