| Abstrakt: |
This article illustrates key features of visual rhetoric as they operate in two professional academic hypertexts and student work designed for the World Wide Web. Any rhetorical theory works as a dynamic system of strategies employed for creating, reacting to, and receiving meaning. An individual author typically operates within multiple social and cultural contexts and, hopefully, advocates ethically for his or her audiences. Thus, digital rhetoric describes a system of ongoing dialogue and negotiations among writers, audiences, and institutional contexts, but it focuses on the multiple modalities available for making meaning using new communication and information technologies. The audience stance is established on the opening screen as music, images, text, and hypertextual structure all set the stage for a highly interactive experience. With the freedom to design her own interface and the support of committee members to explore new techniques for hypertextual structure, scholars created a complex collage of visual and navigational strategies. Similarly, the kinds of agency presented to readers are complex and multifaceted, allowing many choices for interaction, including several ways to read the document. |
