Page 118 - Literacy in the New Media Age

MULTIMODALITY, MULTIMEDIA AND GENRE 107

microscope, and afterwards carrying out the task, given by the teacher, of ‘doing
a report’. Each had to ‘record’ the experiment: to draw what they had seen
through the microscope and to write what they had done in conducting the
experiment. The teacher had given them just two specific instructions: ‘put your
writing at the top of the page’ (the teacher was anxious that the drawing should
not take up too much of the space, so as to leave enough room for writing), and
‘use only your lead pencil – do not use coloured pencils in your drawings’ (to
distinguish ‘scientificness’ – black-and-white drawing – from ‘artisticness’ –
using colour pens – or from ‘everyday realism’). Here I will look at two of the
four texts produced. I am particularly interested in the meanings of formal
aspects – the genre – of the texts.
The first example (Figure 7.1) has the drawing at the top of the page (as did
another one of the four), and the written part of the text at the bottom. Image and
writing are clearly separated on the page; each has its own, slightly differing,
heading. The written text is in the generic form of a ‘recount’. That is, it is a
temporally ordered or sequenced presentation of events reported in sentences.
The image part of the text has the form of a line-drawing; it is not clear that there
is a suitable generic label available to name it.
Here I will first say something briefly about the written part of the text as a
‘recount’, then I will attempt to uncover the generic form of the visual part, and
then speculate on the generic form of the text as a whole. My intention is to answer
the question ‘is the category “genre” useful in a multimodal text and, if so, how
is it useful?’
As I have mentioned, I treat genre as that category which realises the social
relations of the participants involved in the text as interaction. The social
relations which are realised in the recount are of three types: first, those of the
relations of the actors, objects and events which are reported in the recount;
second, those of the relations between the participants in the act of
communication, which are implied by the recount. The third type concerns the
social world that is represented in the recount. The question here is, how is (the
institution of) science represented or constructed as a social activity? Here we are
in large part in the realm of the discursive organisation of the activity, in the
sense of Foucault’s use of ‘discourse’.
The relations ‘in’ the recount are of actors acting in events with and on objects,
either singly (I collected all the equipment) or jointly (we then sorted the
microscope out). This is recounted ‘realistically’, that is, it is presented as being
a recount of the actual, significant events, in the temporal sequence in which they
happened, with a clear enough implication that no other (significant) events
occurred. The recount is ‘complete’; there is closure: it is a completed, finished,
rounded-off textual entity. The recount, as genre, makes an implicit claim about
the relation of the events or practices recounted to other practices in the world,
and of the relation of the domain of the practices to other domains. It is the claim
of realism, in the everyday world. It makes the claims, implicitly: ‘this is,
simply, how it was; these were the main participants, the main events and they