Abstract of

Reading as Mediated and Mediating Action: Composing Meaning for Literature Through Multimedia Interpretive Texts

Peter Smagorinsky

Cindy O'Donnell-Allen

Researchers are increasingly attentive to the need for broader conceptions of literacy. Expanded notions of what constitutes a text have led to the recognition of nonverbal acts of composing as having potential for both the development of new ideas during composing and the representation and further mediation of ideas through the production of and reflection on finished texts. Furthermore, studies in both intertextuality and intercontexuality point to the need to view both reading and composing as extended semiotic processes that are mediated, enabled, and constrained by a variety of situational social factors. This research analyzes the effort of a small group of high school seniors to interpret the character of Laertes in Shakespeare's Hamlet through a body biography, a lifesized human outline that they filled with images and words that represented their understanding of the character. The research examines their discussion as they composed their text, identifying the contextual constraints that structured their activity, the social processes they engaged in within those constraints, and the intertextual connections they used during their production. The analysis reveals the ways in which the process of collaborative multimedia composing has the potential to (a) enable exploratory discussion that leads to new ideas during the process of composing, (b) provide students with multiple vehicles for developing and representing meaning through the multifaceted tool kit of cultural tools available to them, and (c) provide students with opportunities to produce representations of meaning—both mental and artifactual—that in turn serve as the basis for reflection, mediation of ideas, and subsequent development into new forms of representation. Through this extended process of composition, students evoke images of literary meaning, discuss and produce a shared representation, juxtapose their interpretive text to the interpreted text, and revise their interpretive text to better depict the meaning they find in the interpreted text.

Abstract from Smagorinsky, P., & O'Donnell-Allen, C. (1998). Reading as Mediated and Mediating Action: Composing Meaning for Literature Through Multimedia Interpretive Texts. Reading Research Quarterly, 33(2), 198–226. doi: 10.1598/RRQ.33.2.3