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Computers and Composition 31 (2014) 13–28

otes Toward the Role of Materiality in Composing, Reviewing, andAssessing Multimodal Texts

Matthew Davis a,∗, Kathleen Blake Yancey b

a University of Massachusetts Bostonb Florida State University

Received 17 November 2013; accepted 6 January 2014

bstract

In a discussion of validity in writing assessment, Pamela Moss and colleagues call for attention to ethical “IDAs” that constitutessessment: interpretations, decisions, and actions. Our purpose in this article is to engage such a hermeneutical conversation—thats, an exploration, analysis, and interpretation—focused not on how we assess material and multimodal texts, but instead on thereliminary question of how we encounter and interpret them. Here we focus on two genres—the scrapbook and the studentPortfolio—the first emphasizing materiality and the second multiple approaches to multimodality and multimedia.

In this article, our goal is to understand more and better the practices teachers and scholars engage in as they encounter these twoinds of texts, believing that situating this inquiry through materiality and multimodality will help us understand each and assist usn moving toward an ethical and informed assessment practice of them. Ultimately, our argument is that such an approach may beery useful in helping teachers and scholars design both a language and an assessment process for multimodal texts.

2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

eywords: multimodality; materiality; writing assessment; validity; scrapbooks; portfolios

Although multimodal texts are often associated with the late age of print, such texts have been composed for abouts long as humans have roamed the earth. As Lester Faigley (1999) pointed out,

Images and words have long coexisted on the printed page and in manuscripts, but relatively few people possessedthe resources to exploit the rhetorical potential of images combined with words. My argument is that literacy hasalways been a material, multimedia construct but we only now are becoming aware of this multidimensionalityand materiality because computer technologies have made it possible for many people to produce and publishmultimedia presentations. (p. 175)

With increased attention to and the attendant inclusion of such texts in our teaching (e.g., Atkins et al., 2006)

as come an increased need for ways of assessing such texts. Simultaneously, so too has the assessment communityeen rethinking how to provide what Pamela Moss, Brian Girard, and Laura Haniford (2006) called ethical “IDAs”:nterpretations, decisions, and actions. Toward that end, Moss et al. have identified three discourses that, concurrently,

∗ Corresponding author.E-mail address: matthew.davis@umb.edu (M. Davis).

755-4615/$ – see front matter © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2014.01.001

14 M. Davis, K.B. Yancey / Computers and Composition 31 (2014) 13–28

work toward such an effort: educational measurement, hermeneutics, and socio-cultural studies. Taken together, Mossand colleagues argued, these discourses allow us to address (1) the soundness of particular IDAs about learning, (2)the resources of the activity systems in which they are developed and used, and (3) the opportunities for learning thatdifferent activity systems provide their learners (students and professional educators) (p. 149).

Together, the two frameworks provided by Faigley (1999) and Moss, Girard, & Haniford (2006)—the one empha-sizing materiality and the other multiple approaches to assessment—may be useful in helping teachers and scholarsdesign both a language and an assessment process for multimodal texts. As a first step in taking up the task of assessingsuch texts, however, it would be wise to focus on the first of Moss’s IDAs and interpretation, because it sets the stage forany decision or action. Moreover, before interpreting texts, we read them; we thus also need to inquire into and theorizehow we read or process such texts, in large part because we know so little about how such texts are read (Yancey,McElroy, and Powers, 2013). Indeed, reading may not be the appropriate term to describe the practices we engage inwhen, for example, we encounter an electronic portfolio including multiple kinds of texts: print texts, a Prezi, a video,a poster. Even in what seems to be a simpler and related text—a print scrapbook, one antecedent of portfolios—theways we “read” photos are likely different than the way we read their captions, different still from the ways we readthem in concert and in context.

This, of course, raises another question that we attend to as well: What is the role of genre in assessing multimodaltexts?

As to the specific texts—A first set includes scrapbooks depicting two different situations: The San Franciscoearthquake of 1906; and, a sustained correspondence during 1942 and 1944 between Japanese-American women ininternment camps and Japanese American soldiers fighting for the United States. In these scrapbooks, we see composersbringing together multiple resources for meaning making, both within the scrapbook-text and across the world. A secondset of multimodal texts, student electronic portfolios, emerges from an advanced writing course keyed to three differentspaces: the print, the screen, and the net (Davis, Fleckenstein, and Yancey, forthcoming). These eportfolios evolvefrom and constitute new kinds of activity systems with digital forms of meaning making and different affordances fornetworking and circulation than we see in the scrapbooks.

Interestingly, however, both the scrapbooks and the electronic portfolios speak to one dimension of multimodalitythat hitherto has been largely absent from our discussion of both multimodality and writing assessment, the modalityof touch: It is on this modality that we focus our attention.

**Our thinking has been informed by these propositions:

• Multimodality varies across time and culture; affordances and the uses to which they are put vary.• Electronic multimodality adds at least one layer of mediation to the reception of a text. Ironically, even on a

touch screen, you can’t actually touch the text. Which raises the question: In multimodal texts, what role doestouch play?

• Electronic multimodality promises a network of distribution, a Benjaminian mass distribution of the single text,one unavailable to one-of-a-kind scrapbooks, unless of course they are digitized. Does that matter?

• Texts are intended—aren’t they?—to facilitate some interaction. In other words, texts stage a dialogue; in thelanguage of genre, any text responds to a recurring situation but it also forwards, qua Bakhtin, a new situation asit contributes to what we might call the “lifestream” of a genre. Still: a text, a composer, a reviewer, a dialogue.

• Assessment is about what dialogue one might have. Historically, it’s been something of a Platonic dialogue,with test-makers knowing the answers all along; in Peter Elbow’s terms, it’s been more about ranking andevaluating than about liking; more recently, it’s been more about the efficacy of a program, about outcomes,about a feedback loop. Perhaps, per Moss et al. (2006), it could be about meaning-making, about how we makemeaning and what meaning we make of that. And, central to this claim is the role of materiality in the makingof meaning, whether in composing, reading, reviewing, and/or assessing.

The propositions above provide a context for our thinking about validity. As a defining term for writing assessment,validity points in many directions. It suggests, for example, that what is being measured, tested, evaluated, or assessedought to be the thing we are attempting to judge; that our assessments measure what they purport to measure. Itincludes a dimension called “consequential,” referring to the power of an assessment to help the person whose work

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s being examined learn, the principle here that an assessment is valid only to the degree that it helps a studentearn.1

And, validity also refers, as Pamela Moss et al. (2006) explained, as an exercise in decision-making. In thisiew, validity is located in the soundness of the processes of an assessment and in the outcomes that an assessmentosters:

A validity theory provides guidance about what it means to say that an interpretation, decision, or action is moreor less sound; about the sorts of evidence, reasoning, and criteria by which soundness might be judged; and abouthow to develop more sound interpretations, decisions, and actions. (p. 109)

Moreover, Moss et al. have provided some ideas as to what such a process might look like:

What’s needed is a flexible approach to validity that begins with the questions that are being asked; that candevelop, analyze, and integrate multiple types of evidence at different levels of scale; that is dynamic so thatquestions, available evidence, and interpretations can evolve dialectically as inquirers learn from their inquiry;and that allows attention to the antecedents and anticipated and actual consequents of their interpretations,decisions and actions. (p. 111)

Such an assessment practice is based in inquiry; is open to multiple forms of evidence; develops as thenquiry proceeds; and is sensitive to the impact of any interpretation, decision, or action. It thus is integrative inethod,

combining sources of evidence in developing an interpretation. In this approach, readers seek to understand the“whole” body of evidence in light of its parts and the parts in light of the whole. Interpretations are repeatedlytested against the available evidence, until each of the parts can be accounted for in a coherent interpretation ofthe whole (Bleicher, 1980; Ormiston & Schrift, 1990; Schmidt, 1995). This iterative process is referred to as thehermeneutic circle. As new sources of evidence are encountered, developed, and brought to bear, the hermeneuticcircle expands, thus allowing a dynamic approach to interpretation. (p. 130)

Given this concept of validity, how might we begin to understand our chosen texts? What questions might we ask?ost important, how do we apprehend and interpret “the ‘whole’ body of evidence,” what meaning do we make of it,

nd why?This thinking about assessment, multimodality, and materiality is shared by both of us, the authors. In the next two

ections, however, we part company, as Yancey addresses scrapbooks Davis has never seen and as Davis interpretstudent work composed in a classroom Yancey never visited. We then conclude this article in a single voice.

. The interpretation of scrapbooks: Kathleen Blake Yancey

As the US entered the 20th century, most people were fortunate if they completed a minimal amount of schooling,ypically culminating in 8th grade, but they often wrote, often everyday—letters, diaries, lists, notes, receipts,elegrams, tapping new technologies and genres as they did so. One of those new genres, scrapbooks—given theirultimodal character, their repurposing of extant texts, and their inclusion of new texts, both punctuated with

hotos made possible by new cameras—is particularly of interest to an inquiry into multimodality and assessmentf multimodal texts. Like all texts, scrapbooks are mediated, but the mediation of scrapbooks is lower or less thanor digital texts; that is, “readers” apprehend a scrapbook directly, engaging it through touch. In fact, it could beaid that that they come alive through touch; there is an immediacy with scrapbooks that is different in kind than

egree from the immediacy of their digital multimodal counterparts. This aspect or dimension of multimodality is notddressed in Kress’s (2010) Multimodality, nor in Jody Shipka’s (2011) Toward a Composition Made Whole, where,or example, the materiality of students’ texts—the now-famous ballet-slippers provide a case in point—is the surface

1 Fuller accounts of validity in writing assessment are provided in Sandra Murphy and Kathleen Blake Yancey’s (2008), “Construct and conse-uence: Validity in writing assessment” in Charles Bazerman’s, A handbook of research on writing: history, society, school, individual, text. Andnother, related account of the Charles Moore scrapbook, interpreted in the following paragraph, is provided in Yancey (2013), “A close reading of

1906 San Francisco scrapbook: Three concurrent accounts; material form; and remix textuality.”

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for composing but is not factored into how the text is read. In certain genres like scrapbooks, however, touch, thetactile, is central to the making of meaning, is perhaps the basic modality, mechanism or filter through which meaningis made—for both composer and reviewer2. This sense of multimodal composing thus accords with that put forwardby Tracy Bowen and Carl Whithaus (2013): “It involves the conscious manipulation of the interaction among varioussensory experiences—visual, textual, verbal, tactile, and aural—used in the processes of producing and readingtexts” (p. 7).

Two scrapbooks presenting different kinds of narratives—if they are in fact simply narratives—help us understandsomething about the multimodality of everyday writers in the first half of the 20th century: One documenting onefamily’s experience of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake including the earthquake’s impact in San Jose and thealarmed reactions and actions of an immediate family member in New York City; one documenting the World War IIcorrespondence between Japanese women in internment camps with Japanese American soldiers fighting in both theAtlantic and Pacific theatres from 1942-1944. As important, and as these scrapbooks demonstrate, three forms of touchcontribute to scrapbooks: (1) the physical making of the artifacts that the scrapbooks include; (2) the physical makingof the scrapbook itself, in which the original texts are re-positioned, re-contextualized, for another purpose; (3) and thephysical reading of the scrapbook, in which the reader, touching each page and often manipulating the original artifactson each page, makes meaning both of each text and of the larger set of texts. In addition, these scrapbooks invitetwo forms of review specifically located in physical materiality, what I call enactment: The enactment of meaning-making when reading a traditionally focused scrapbook, the enactment of meaning-making when the scrapbook itselfis communal and kaleidoscopic.

**As part of investigating the everyday writing ordinary composers engaged in during the United States in the 20th

century, I happened upon the Charles Moore scrapbook in digitized form. It’s a scrapbook rich in material texts,including 32 photographs, 15 telegrams, 1 picture postcard, 1 list, 11 letters, 2 cards, and 6 newspaper clippings.Collectively, the materials present the story of the Charles Moore family when on April 18, the morning of the1906 San Francisco earthquake, Mrs. Moore and her mother were in San Jose narrowly escaping from the wreck oftheir hotel; “Mother Moore,” Charles’ mother, and the Moore children Josephine and Mary Beatrice were shakenbut alive in Oakland; and Mr. Moore was in New York City telegraphing messages about how he was returningimmediately. This seemingly single story, however, is the first of three concurrent stories: (1) the personal story ofthe family’s experience of the earthquake and the reunification of the family; (2) the professional story about anddocumentation of the destruction of Charles Moore’s place of business, which as shown in photos and claimed inwords, was caused by fire, “not earthquake,” in the process implicitly arguing for the insurance payment that firepermits and earthquakes do not; and (3) interlocking public stories—of a family friend who was killed by a mobin the aftermath of the earthquake, about the 28,000+ buildings that were destroyed, about a city in recovery andrebirth.

2 Kress (2010) does discuss the importance of tactility and haptic feedback in design—most especially in his discussion of the design of canopeners—but the texts he discusses and the relative brevity with which he discusses them differ substantially from the texts and experiences wedescribe here.

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M. Davis, K.B. Yancey / Computers and Composition 31 (2014) 13–28 17

These three stories, however, were not immediately apparent to me when I initially encountered the scrapbook,hich I found on the web, and like any good web reader, I invented my own progress through the materials. In otherords, my reading of the scrapbook did not follow the linear logic of the physical scrapbook, but rather, linkingy way through scrapbook pages digitally unhinged from the scrapbook frame, it followed the logic of the web

Yancey, 2004). The logic of the physical scrapbook—like the logic of the book and indeed of print portfolios—isemediated on the book: like the book, a scrapbook in its physical form “proceeds in a linear fashion from begin-ing to end” (Yancey, 2004, p. 748). It privileges the composer’s perspective, and although in theory a reader mayove through a scrapbook hypertextually, the linear arrangement of the scrapbook argues for a beginning-to-end

eading. But I didn’t encounter a physical scrapbook; I encountered a digitized version of the scrapbook with a dif-erent set of affordances, among which is the ability to read it not as it is arranged, but as I arranged it. Beginningith the end, I moved backward to the beginning, and then dipped into the middle. Arrangement in this kind of

nstance does more than invent a composer, as I have argued elsewhere (Yancey, 2004): It also invents a reader,n this case inventing a hypertextual reader who wasn’t particularly sensitive or responsive to the materials of thecrapbook.

Fast forward: 18 months later, I traveled to San Francisco to read the physical scrapbook, a reading experienceadically different from that of its digitized cousin, informed by the physical materials themselves and by the linearrrangement of the scrapbook as it unfolded the three narratives. To read the scrapbook, I needed the tactile: to begin,o open the cover; to continue, to turn each page. On some pages, I needed to turn the scrapbook so that the photo waspright or so I could read the handwriting running vertically next to the photo. On others, I needed a magnifying glasso read some of the script. To make meaning of an experience that was foreign to me, I needed to try to inhabit that

oment of time, to read, for example, the Spenserian script in a letter that was common then, with nouns capitalizednd expressions—“taking time by the forelock”—located in that moment and that time. All reading is participatory—as

eaders, we construct our own readings—but this reading process is physically participatory; without touch, I couldot read.

Two aspects of the scrapbook in relation to the tactile are particularly important here: the inherent and enduringactile quality of physical photographs and accompanying materials; and the genre of the scrapbook itself. Our attention

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to photographs as a composition is now commonplace: We think in terms, perhaps, of the ways a photo represents,of how it, in Susan Sontag’s (1973) and John Berger’s (1972) terms, provides only a discontinuous slice of reality, ofhow in necessarily de-contextualizing an image from its place of origin it is already repurposing, and of how it can berepurposed again, re-contextualized anew for other purposes. But, in talking about these features of photographs, wetypically think of the digital photo, not of the physical photo, the photo that is over 100 years old, the photo that bringswith it not only

sight but touch and even smell. From its earliest days the relationship with photographs has demanded a physicalengagement—photo-objects exists in relationship to the human body, making photographs as objects intrinsicallyactive in that they are handled, touched, caressed. This may not necessarily reflect the original intention (whichwas to create an image) but is none the less intrinsic to the object. (Edwards, 1999, p. 225)

As scrapbook composers sort through and select photographs—much like the makers of other multimodal compo-sitions, portfolios and Wunderkammer, different spaces but both composed through processes of collecting, selecting,reflecting, and recontextulizing—they rely on a felt sense located in touch, a literal, embodied kind connecting touchto felt meaning. In “reading” the scrapbook, the reader enacts something of the same process, engaging with the scrap-book through many kinds of touch, among them in this scrapbook the turning of pages, the opening of envelopes, theunfolding of letters, the spreading out of newspapers—and then the re-folding of letters and newspaper clippings, thereplacing of each item on its scrapbook page, much as the scrapbook composer originally did. As Elizabeth Edwards(1999) observed:

In the many hours I have spent watching people look at photographs, the describing of content is accompaniedby what would appear to be an almost insuperable desire to touch, even stroke, the image. Again the viewer isbrought into bodily contact with the trace of the remembered. Thus we can say that the photograph has alwaysexisted, not merely as an image but in relation to the human body, tactile in experienced time, objects functioningwithin everyday practice. (1999, p. 228)

The photograph and the letters, in other words, carry a trace of the tactile: “Objects are links between past andpresent, and photographs have a double link as image and as material, two ontological layers in one object” (Edwards,1999, p. 226). As a reader of this scrapbook and in my enacting-reading, I engage in a duplicative composing activitythat is not separate, not removed, not objective; the meaning I create is a function of my interaction with, my handlingof, the materials.

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As important is the genre of the scrapbook, one that privileges association and juxtaposition, one that despite itsinear form—working from page to page to page—presents multiple materials in dialogue with a composer’s intentions,n dialogue with each other, in dialogue with multiple contexts, and in dialogue with a reader’s enactment. Commentingn these features of the genre, Stephanie Snyder, in the preface to Snapshot chronicles: Inventing the American photolbum, (Snyder et al., 2006) pointed to what she called the genre’s “interplay” of such contexts and materials:

In contrast to the individual work of art, the album’s genius resides in the interplay between material transfor-mation and narrative chronology—between precision and accident. Within these albums, personal narratives areinterwoven with studies of the commercial sphere and the public spectacle, expressing both the individualismand collectivity of American life—a communitas of representation. (p. 13)

Moreover, in this interplay, scrapbook composers create “self-made chronicles” externalizing “concerns and [their]emories, [their] relationships and [their] desires; we preserve the past where we can see it and touch it to revisit it,

n order to embrace it” (Snyder et al., 2006, p. 13). Viewers, of course, aren’t revisiting, but are rather enacting thexperience of the scrapbook composer, are engaging in another interplay, one toggling between the materials of thecrapbook and the viewers’ interpretation of those materials.

**

In 1942, Japanese Americans were “removed” from their homes, sent to re-assembly camps, then to internmentamps, an incremental journey recorded in diaries and letters. Simultaneously, many Japanese American men signedp and went to war on behalf of the US.

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Wanting to support their brothers and fathers fighting overseas, five young women calling themselves the Cru-saders decided to write to them. Initially writing handwritten notes to two soldiers on penny postcards, these youngwomen—spread across the west and midwest in different internment camps—eventually wrote to over 5,000 JapaneseAmerican soldiers in newsletters composed by hand and on typewriters and eventually produced on a mimeographmachine. And we know about this experience, in part, because of a scrapbook telling this story.3

Unlike my experience with the Charles Moore scrapbook, I’ve read only the physical scrapbook; there is no digitalversion. Unlike the Charles Moore scrapbook, this Crusader scrapbook has a known composer: Ruth Ishizaki, one ofthe Crusaders.

Unlike the Charles Moore scrapbook, this one—titled “Memoirs of the Jerome Crusaders and the Denson U.S.O.and the Crusaders in Rohwer”—isn’t anchored in the personal story of a single family, but rather is located in thecollective experience of many Japanese Americans during World War II who began to know each other through aforced internment camp experience. These young women understood the power of writing to provide support forJapanese American men—some who were family, some who were strangers—who fighting for the very countryinterning the Crusaders; and this scrapbook tells the Crusader story. In addition, in the 28 pages of the scrapbook, wesee the responses of those soldiers to the women who wrote them—in letters of thanks, in occasional cards celebratingChristmas and Easter, in postcards narrating life in Europe. This scrapbook, though, is more collection than selection,more assemblage of many materials, seemingly representing the two years some Crusaders spent in Jerome, Arkansasentirely through their writing to and their responses from many soldiers, than it is coherent account of the Crusadersor their correspondents.

According to the standards we usually apply to narratives or chronicles, this scrapbook would not fare well. Anassemblage, it isn’t assembled. There is much I don’t know as I turn pages, read cards, and handle materials. I don’tknow the identities of the Crusaders, nor exactly how many there were or where they lived. I don’t know the identitiesof the soldiers to whom they wrote. And, because the scrapbook is in such disrepair—pages yellowed, falling out, theiredges torn, bound to the scrapbook cover by a shoelace—the story feels fragile, vulnerable. And yet: This vulnerability

compels me to attend. The mosaic of different materials from different people creates a kaleidoscopic effect that I’maware of both mentally and physically—as I turn the pages, as I lift a newsletter, open it, turn its pages and then returnit to the scrapbook, as I read a postcard, as I touch a letter returned with a standardized stamp: “Killed in Action.”

3 This is one of two such scrapbooks: this one is housed in the San Jose Japanese American museum, the other in the National Japanese AmericanMuseum in Los Angeles.

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ogether, the absence of context and the mosaic materiality accomplish two ends. First, the mosaic mimics well, Ihink, the experience of being suddenly ripped from one’s home, remanded with strangers to a foreign land, of makinghose strangers one’s friends, of making something remarkable out of the experience. The unassembled quality of thecrapbook is in this sense performative, representing equally well the random quality of the new life, the attending tohe incremental, and the incremental in its sedimentation beginning to form a new life, the valiant effort to redeemhis experience with human meaning. Second, collectively the materials comprise a rich text, although without muchontext or meta-narrative; these materials thus invite the reader to work with them to provide that context, to use thenactment of reading as a platform for making meaning, about the Crusaders and their correspondents, about the globalorces disrupting their lives, contextualizing their composing.

In the case of scrapbooks, it’s easier to divorce discussions of them from an impulse to evaluate. Readers are lessikely to ask if they’re “good” than to inquire about the stories they tell. Readers can read beyond how “well put-ogether” the text might be; instead, readers physically and mentally engage scrapbooks to enact a past, bringing itack to life, reflecting on how scrapbooks can help make sense of the past, working with the scrapbook to enact the pastnd to make meaning in the present. Scrapbooks exert what Charles Hill (2004) called presence: “The extent to whichn object or concept is foremost in the consciousness of the audience members... elements with enhanced presenceill have a greater influence over the audience’s attitudes and beliefs” (p. 28). But, student texts, precisely because

hey are student texts, don’t always bring the advantage of presence with them: for the most part, they were created toe evaluated. Whatever other purposes they might take on, whatever other uses they might serve, they are most oftenexts to be assessed, and to be assessed within the relatively narrow context of school. Here, the juxtaposition of 21st

entury student portfolios with 20th Century scrapbooks invites invite readers to wonder: What if scholars and teachersalked about these sets of texts in similar ways? What kinds of conversation could student texts elicit, and then whate might do about that conversing?

**

. The interpretation of student electronic portfolios: Matthew Davis

As with the scrapbooks, the stories of the student portfolios here track across different contexts: Their times, places,nd purposes change, and so does the way we value them. Originally, they were composed for a required course inn undergraduate writing major. In 2009, the Florida State University English Department launched a writing majorrack, Editing, Writing, and Media (EWM), which “re-conceives the English major for the 21st century” (Englishepartment). Within this FSU major track, students are required to take Writing and Editing in Print and Online

WEPO), a course designed to provide students with the challenge of reading and producing texts across various mediaincluding print, screen, and network) and creating a digital portfolio.4

One layer of value for these portfolios is set by the WEPO course goals. Students are to:

Explore and learn theories of composing-designing and the rhetorical principles that guide them; Employ these theories and principles to create works appropriate to various media; Develop a metacognitive awareness of rhetorical principles; Write with and against styles conventionalized within different genres; and Examine and apply the art and techniques of editing.5

The digital portfolio assignment, the final of the semester, included a proposal, drafts, peer review, the portfoliotself, a presentation to the class, and a reflection.

4 For more on the major itself, see Matt Davis, Kristie Fleckenstein, and Kathleen Blake Yancey’s (forthcoming) “A matter of design: Contextnd available resources in the development of a new English major at Florida State University.”5 These goals come from the FSU university curricular request form sample syllabus, the packet of materials approved by the university in thereation of WEPO. An amended version of these goals appeared on the WEPO syllabus for the course in which the portfolios were created.

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What follows traces the work in two student eportfolios that, through remediating a sense of touch, show how theinterplay of different materials can influence the interpretations one makes about student texts.

**A sense of touch seems a strange beginning for a discussion of student electronic portfolios, but let’s start there.

Kala’s portfolio, the Kalaidoscope (pun intended), details her work for the WEPO class as well as her creative writingand artwork. It also offers a snippet of her resume (with the promise of more upon request), and a contact page. Bothin visual representation and in the actual composing of her portfolio, touch plays a major role. First, and most obvious,is the leitmotif of hands: They appear at the bottom of her landing page as a repeated series of fingers (seen at top ingreen), which upon cursor, hover change to different colors.

On the page presenting her self-sponsored poetry, each poem is represented by a glowing scan of a hand, and fingerspeek up like flames from behind the word “portfolio.” As Kala designed her portfolio, I remember asking her aboutthe hands—I thought them both somewhat odd and arresting. She explained to me that because most of her writingwas done on paper—and all of her artwork was composed on either paper or canvas—composing the portfolio “feltstrange”, primarily because she couldn’t touch the things she was making. As she explained to me, with pen, ink,watercolors, and charcoal, tactility was one of the major components of both her composing and the compositionsthemselves. When composing online, it felt strange not to have that feeling.

Associational and etymological connections are at play here: hands, fingers, digits, digitality. There is another aspectof the portfolio, however, that connects Kala’s lack of felt sense, touch, and digital composing: the remediations ofher artwork. On the page containing Kala’s sketches and watercolors, the viewer has the option of scanning through

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he gallery of work or looking through an expanded view of each individual work. The pictures show a particularascination with the senses, depicting faces, fruits, flowers, pipes, and drink—all things to be smelled, tasted, touched.

The process by which these artifacts came to be included in Kala’s portfolio—as with the images of hands—is byay of remediation: Moving from print to screen, she scanned the artifacts to her computer for posting on the digitalage. Though this process of remediation creates for the artifacts new avenues of circulation and new intertextualpportunities (or does it create new artifacts?), it also effaces their bounded, textured materiality.

This sort of remediation—a movement from print to digital artifact, usually by scanning, purposively evokingouch—was not an isolated occurrence in the student portfolios. Due in part to the course’s focus on materiality andn part to nostalgia for print on the part of student composers, evoking touch was characteristic of the texts. Chris’ortfolio, which represented him as “the student, writer & digital artist,” focused on four types of work: coursework,reative writing, art, and music. I noticed that my requirements for the portfolio—that the students represent theirork from the course—comprised only one-quarter of what Chris saw as important about his own composing. Had he

reated the portfolio for a different purpose, his schoolwork might not have even made the cut.

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Chris’ portfolio is a lesson in remediation as the interplay of print and digital media. First, his opening page presentsa stylized goldfish (or coy?), the sidebar noting its original composition: “’Untitled Fish’ (c) 2010/pencil, oil pastel,and black pen on tea-stained printer paper.” It is scanned in at such high resolution that the individual pencil strokesand tea stains are visible. The gallery of his artistic work shows other variations on a theme: scanned in pencil sketcheson notebook pages, logos, digitized oil pastel on canvas, depictions of musicians and movie characters, and digitallyrendered mash-ups of creative commons photos.

The context Chris provides for the artwork gives insight into multiple compositional histories: Several were com-posed collaboratively—sketched by a friend, where Chris provided the digitization and texture. Some were originallycomposed for other purposes: as a gift, to promote a band, to stave off boredom in a high school class. These contextscomplicate efforts to talk about and assess the portfolio, though there’s no question that the portfolio is richer for thesematerials.

Here’s something: All this, so far, is separate—and in addition to—the composing required of Chris for theassignment.

And another thing: Chris also includes a music page where one can listen to pieces he’s written and recorded, readan ethos-building history of his musical training, and contact him in case of the need for a studio guitarist, musicteacher, or tutor for specific instruments. No touch, but sound.

And then there’s this: Chris created a series of paper blocks for one of his previous course projects. They weredesigned to explain the concept “convergence culture” (Jenkins, 2008) to his little brother, who was in elementaryschool. To do so, however, Chris felt that he would need something tactile—something that could be played with—tohold his brother’s attention. Chris created digital images for his project, images that reappear on a page in his digitalportfolio.

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Each of the six cross-like images is the layout of one block—six color-coded sides with six different messages aboutonvergence culture. Chris writes in his reflection that “these are the print-outs that when cutout and folded properlyreate a sort of three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.” After printing, cutting, folding, and taping the images together, Chrisurned in a set of block-like cubes that could be manipulated such that one can read across them in a number of waysThe photograph is in an attempt to render them accurately).

Most obviously, the cubes work like the puzzle Chris mentions: When arranged according to number and with colorsatched (as in the image with the cubes), one can read across them: topic, definition, and example (though not always

n that order).

.

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Written out, the text on the blocks looks like this:Green: (1) [media] convergence

(2) is the flow of media across platforms(3) game, book, film (with Harry Potter images)

Lilac: (1) Henry Jenkins(2) is an American media scholar, wrote “Convergence Culture”, presents 3 important concepts..(3)–media convergence, - participatory culture, - collective intelligence

Yellow: (1) when media convergence occurs, consumers(2) are courted across multiple platforms.(3) in turn, cooperation between media industries occurs. Migration behavior is when consumers will go anywhere to get what they want

Orange: (1) Collective Intelligence(2) (images of Google, WebMD, Wikipedia logos)(3) bits of information are contributed by many. A knowledge bank is formed.

Blue: (1) Convergence culture (images of iPod front and back)(2) is where old and new media collide. Grassroots & corporate media intersect.(3) power of media producers and media consumers interact in unpredictable ways.

Lavender:(1) Participatory Culture(2) is when media consumers interact with eachother [sic]. People take media into their own hands.(3) Youube, blogs, fan forums and more! (image of Harry Potter related book)

Representing or explaining the blocks this way does injustice to their material and combinatorial possibilities;representation of the blocks in the form of images and text does little to highlight the tactility of the blocks—the waysthat they encourage manual manipulation and play. There is a dimensionality to the blocks different from in digitaltexts (and most print texts, and this text): to engage the blocks-as-text requires particular, dynamic configurations ofhands and eyes—of bodies. Though difficult to represent here, these are dimensions of materiality that influencedChris’ choices as he composed: In his reflection for the project he mentioned that the tactile nature of his projectwould provide the “fun” that would be necessary to keep his brother’s attention for long enough to grasp the conceptsrepresented. Chris’ blocks take the relationship of materiality and audience seriously, demonstrating how new mediatexts can engage particular audiences in particular ways. In short, Chris’ eportfolio attempts to represent a tactileenactment more reminiscent of scrapbooks than webpages.

And lest I forget: The writing for the course, which seems a by-the-way in the portfolio, is also there. Chris’ literaturereview on internet suppression in China, his anti-advertisement on the dangers of sunbathing, and his remix projecton how the history of the Titanic voyage is represented in the popular James Cameron film are all in the section oncoursework.

If what’s at stake in assessment depends on use, and if use depends on such a vast array of material artifacts, purposes,audiences, and compositional practices, how can I begin to assess Kala and Chris’ portfolios without a conversationacknowledging the complexity of the interplay among their individual texts, their networked intertextuality, their useof modal resources in appealing to my senses, and the stories of their mediated selves? Both portfolios suggest thatan assessment take into account texts that privilege the aesthetic—Kala’s watercolors and Chris’ music—as well asthose with more rhetorical purposes—Kala’s resume and contact page and Chris’ blocks. Both portfolios also suggestthan an assessment account for work in and movement across different media, from Kala’s digitized hands to Chris’high-resolution scan of “Untitled Fish.” Finally, both portfolios suggest that an assessment respond to a wide range ofmodalities—both modalities present and those invoked.

3. Concluding forward: Matthew Davis and Kathleen Blake Yancey

The Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Research is currently pursuing four propositions related to the assessmentof electronic portfolios. The first of these, “Interaction of Pieces of Evidence,” speaks to both the nature of eportfoliosand the nature of multimodality: “For meaningful assessment, interaction of pieces of evidence within an eportfolio ismore important than single pieces of evidence” (Cambridge, Cambridge, & Yancey, 2013). This proposition certainlyholds true for scrapbooks, which rely on multiple pieces of evidence. The context-rich Charles Moore scrapbook

includes many kinds of evidence; indeed nearly every page includes multiple kinds of evidence interacting with eachother in the frame of the page. The context-light Crusaders scrapbook likewise: Letters and cards and newsletters andpostcards create, narrate, document, and represent a material mosaic of experience for a group of people increasinglybound to each other, people who largely had never met. It is through the interaction of such artifacts—often juxtaposed

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nd associatively linked—and the reader’s interaction with them that one traces meaning. In a scrapbook, an enactmentuite literally traces meaning: through touch. As important, the genre of the scrapbook fosters such an approach: as aernacular genre, it is relatively unregulated, and its open-ness invites meaning-making for both composers and readers.omposers are free to select texts and to make texts, including photos, inside a scrapbook frame; the experience of theaking of the scrapbook composition is enacted by readers, tracing their own and others’ meanings emerging from

he reading, a tracing through which meaning is created. Such a reading lends itself to multiple interpretations—is theharles Moore scrapbook about the San Francisco earthquake, the family’s experience, and/or the composing practicesf the time?

So too for electronic portfolios. In some ways, electronic portfolios, although often based in school settings, are the1st century version of scrapbooks in their newness, their open-ness, their ability to provide space for many differentinds of artifacts and modalities, their ability to point readers to many different paths, their ability to incorporate andnter-relate and layer the modalities of the age—layout and design; word and image; video and audio; rendering andoice-over. Moreover, they are not bound yet by expectation or school restrictions, not nearly fully conventionalizeds a genre, at least not in the EWM major. Accordingly, students use the space to roam from personal compositions tochool writings and back, providing multiple possible readings and interpretations through the interaction of multiplertifacts, tracing the connections they make across multiple sites of literacy, in the process using the screen to representore fully embodied composing. Here Lester Faigley’s (1999) argument “that texts are not transparent and that reading

nd writing are situated acts” rings true both for us and for the composers we study (p. 174).And interestingly, the physical—the felt sense of touch—haunts the eportfolio, which through its display on the

creen tends to flatten three-dimensional composing processes and texts. Despite the fact that materiality is differentor eportfolios and scrapbooks – and “in the face of claims that computer-mediated language and images have brokenith the past and have lost reference to the perceived world” – these texts show that students still compose with an

ye to the “material consequences” of their work (Faigley, 1999, p. 197). In other words, through the eportfolio’sbility to welcome artifacts and commentary, EWM students have demonstrated that they compose in and across threeimensions, that they evoke the senses in describing their composing, that they use the resources of the digital tohow us what capacious, material-rich composing is like for them. What’s missing here is the handling that defines theateriality of the scrapbook—for both composer and reader.In reading these each of these texts, then, we have engaged in a Moss et al. (2006) inspired hermeneutical conver-

ation, raising questions, making meaning, sometimes alone in dialogue with a composer, sometimes collectively withim or her or them. Through this process, we understand more about how we read, which helps us understand whate read, a process enhanced through the reading of two kinds of texts—scrapbooks and eportfolios—whose similarityelps define their difference. Such a process is interpretively rich, helps us to make knowledge, and can lead to action.ut, it’s fair to note that in our discussion of the Moss et al. schema of “interpret, decide, and act,” we interpreted, bute didn’t decide: We didn’t approve or disapprove, and we certainly didn’t provide a score or a grade. But, we did

ssess: We focused on what was important in what we read—as do composers in collecting, selecting, and excludingn creating these texts—and from that we, like they, learned. Perhaps that—learning—is the most important gift thatn assessment of a multimodal text can provide.

atthew Davis is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he teaches graduate and undergraduateourses in literacy, composition, and new media. He also directs the professional writing and graduate tutoring programs. His research interestsnclude literacy studies, technology and writing pedagogy, and collaborative learning and writing, and his work appears in Teaching With Studentexts (2011), Undergraduate Writing Majors: Eighteen Program Profiles (forthcoming) and in Enculturation.

athleen Blake Yancey is Kellogg W. Hunt and Distinguished Research Professor of English at Florida State University. She has served in severaleadership positions—including as Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and President of the Council of Writingrogram Administrators; currently, she co-directs the Inter/National Coalition on Electronic Portfolio Research. She is the author, editor or co-editorf over 75 chapters and refereed articles and eleven books, among them Situating Portfolios (1997), Electronic Portfolios 2.0 (2009), Deliveringollege Composition (2006), and Writing across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing, to be published in spring 2014.

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ambridge, Darren, Cambridge, Barbara, & Yancey, Kathleen. (2013). Comparison, not standardization: An asset and core component of electronicportfolios. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

dwards, Elizabeth. (1999). Photographs as objects of memory. In Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, & Jeremy Aynsley (Eds.), Material memories:Design and evocation (pp. 221–236). Oxford: Berg.

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Faigley, Lester. (1999). Material literacy and visual design. In Jack Selzer, & Sharon Crowley (Eds.), Rhetorical Bodies: Toward a Material Rhetoric(pp. 171–201). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Hill, Charles A. (2004). The psychology of rhetorical images. In Charles A. Hill, & Marguerite Helmers (Eds.), Defining visual rhetorics (pp.25–40). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Jenkins, Henry. (2008). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press.Kress, Gunther. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. New York: Routledge.Moss, Pamela, Girard, Brian, & Haniford, Laura. (2006). Validity in educational assessment. Review of Research in Education, 30, 109–162.Snyder, Stephanie; Levine, Barbara & Douglas F. (2006). Cooley Memorial Art Gallery. Snapshot chronicles: Inventing the American photo album.

New York: Princeton Architectural Press.Yancey, Kathleen; McElroy, Stephen; & Powers, Elizabeth. (2013). Composing, networks, and electronic portfolios: Notes toward a theory of

assessing eportfolios. In Heidi McKee & Dànielle DeVoss (Eds.), Digital writing assessment and evaluation. Computers & Composition DigitalPress. Retrieved from http://ccdigitalpress.org/ebooks-and-projects/dwae

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. (2004). Postmodernism, palimpsest, and portfolios: Theoretical issues in the representation of student work. CollegeComposition and Communication, 55(4), 738–761.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. (2013). A close reading of a 1906 San Francisco scrapbook: Three concurrent accounts; material form; and remix textuality.In Grame Farnell (Ed.), The photograph and the collection (pp. 312–340). London, UK: Museum ETC.