What's Rising? Writing and Semiotic Remediation in Trajectories of Disciplinary Becoming

• In Event: 58.081 - Exploring Authorship in the Age of Mass Literacy: The Rise of Writing in People's Everyday Lives

Abstract

Brandt (2015) portrays a changing literate landscape in which the value, functions, organization, and density of writing have so significantly altered that writing has supplanted reading as the core dimension of literacy. However, changing semiotic landscapes, as well as theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence, have also challenged modal mappings centered on the orality-literacy binary in receptive and productive pairs: reading and writing, speaking and listening. Drawing on theory, literature, and empirical evidence from a lifespan study of disciplinarity focusing on a post-doctoral biologist, this paper contrasts Brandt’s two-mode map of literacy with a dialogic semiotics that considers semiotic remediation (Prior, Hengst, Roozen, & Shipka, 2006; Prior & Hengst, 2010) as the key unit of analysis.
The paper briefly reviews Brandt’s argument for “writing over reading,” focusing particularly on how her methods, analysis, and theory construct this historical contest between two literate modes. It then turns to theories of writing that have long seen writing as deeply entangled in multiple semiotic means and media (e.g., Witte, 1992; Smagorinsky & Coppock, 1994; Prior, 1998, 2010; Shipka, 2011) and have questioned the orality-literacy divide (e.g., Scribner & Cole, 1981; Heath, 1983; Street, 1984; Rowsell, 2013). It then briefly illustrates the semiotic remediation framework through two case studies, one of a basic college writer pursuing a career in journalism (Roozen, 2008, 2012) and one of an engineering student deploying tables across a wide range of genres, contexts, and semiotic forms (Roozen & Erickson, in press). These case studies set the stage for the research reported here.
Based on life-history, semi-structured, and text-based interviews; observations; and a collection of texts that range from recent publications in leading journals to home and school writing during elementary school, this case focuses on Nora, a post-doctorate biologist researching the behavioral neuroendocrinology of birds’ social bonding.
Tracing the diverse semiotic engagements that have shaped Nora’s disciplinary identity as a biologist and her composing of texts, this analysis focuses on three critical points. First, her developmental trajectory densely entangles many putative social categories (school, work, home, community, science). Second, her literate practices mix together multiple semiotics. For example, her writing, thinking, and reading have been heavily scaffolded by talk. Third, her texts—from elementary school to the present—are often multimedia genres (Lemke, 1998). Overall, the results portray, as Latour (1993, 2005) would suggest, intensely mediated and entangled networks, which are more consistent with the semiotic remediation framework.
Where Brandt (2015) charts historical developments (educational, occupational, technological, economic and political) of the early 21st century as the competitive ranking of two modes (reading and writing) in shifting macrosocial mentalities, the theoretical and empirical arguments here suggest a more complex landscape where there may not only be more writing, but more talk, more visual representation (image and film), more object production, more reading, and more engagement with varied digital and material media. The conclusion argues that much is at stake for theory, methodology, and practice (including pedagogical practice) in our interpretation of what is rising in the current semiotic landscape.

Author

• Paul A. Prior, University of Illinois