Suguru Ishizaki

Kinetic typography: issues in time-based presentation of text

This paper introduces research in kinetic typography, a new method of displaying text that takes advantage of the dynamic nature of digital media. We suggest a preliminary set of design issues by which kinetic typography may be understood and used.

Multiagent model of dynamic design: visualization as an emergent behavior of active design agents

This research has been motivated by the lack of models and languages in the visual design field that are able to address design solutions, which continuously adapt in response to the dynamic changes both in the information itself and in the goals or intentions of the information recipient. This paper postulates a muhiagent model of dynamic design--a theoretical framework of design that provides a model with which the visual designer can think during the course of designing. The model employs a decentralized model of design as a premise, and borrows its conceptual model from the improvisational performance, such as dance and music, and bases its theoretical and technical framework on the field of multiagent systems. A design solution is considered an emergent behavior of a collection of active design agents, or performers, each of which is responsible for presenting a particular segment of information. The graphical behaviors of design agents are described by their dynamic activities--rather than by the traditional method of fixed attributes. The model is illustrated with two design projects, Dynamic News Display System and E-Mail Display, both of which were implemented using a multiagent design simulation system, perform, along with an agent description language, persona.

Presence and Global Presence in Genres of Self-Presentation: A Framework for Comparative Analysis

We review Perelman and Olbrechts-Tytecas original formulation of presence as a technique of argument associated primarily with the selection of individual rhetorical elements, and the recent extension of the notion by Gross and Dearin, where presence is understood as a second-order effect that denotes the systematic expression and inhibition of patterns of rhetorical elements across an entire text or rhetorical artifact. We argue for an additional extension to this more global notion of presence, one that makes it not only global within a text or class of texts, but also comparative, allowing the analyst to make rigorous comparisons of expressed and inhibited rhetorical patterns across different texts, or different classes of texts, including different rhetorical genres. A return to the original conception of presence allows us to make this extension, and we illustrate global presence within this newly proposed comparative framework by analyzing two genres of self-presentation in classroom practice: the cover letter and the self-portrait. We show the close ties between global presence and genre as ways of theorizing deep similarities across texts.

Teaching Language Awareness in Rhetorical Choice Using IText and Visualization in Classroom Genre Assignments

This article introduces an IText system the authors built to enhance student practice in language awareness within commonly taught written genres (e.g., self-portraits, profiles, scenic writing, narratives, instructions, and arguments). The system provides text visualization and analysis that seek to increase students’ sensitivity to the rhetorical and whole-text implications of the small runs of language they read and write. The authors describe the way the system can create possibilities for classroom discourse and discussion about student writing that seem harder to reproduce in traditional writing classrooms. They also describe the limitations of the current system for wide-scale use and its future prospects.

Textual genre analysis and identification

This chapter reports on a research program that investigates language and text from a rhetorical point of view. By rhetorical, we mean an approach that features the relationship between the speaker and the audience or between the writer and the reader. Fundamental to a rhetorical approach to language is an interest in linguistic and textual agency, how speakers and writers manage to use language strategically to affect audiences; and how audiences and readers, agents in their own right, manage, or not, to pick up on, register, and respond to a speaker or writers bids. Historical and cultural factors play a central role in how speakers and writer settle into agent roles vis-a-vis listeners and readers. It is therefore no surprise that rhetorical approaches to language treat language, culture, and history as deeply permeable with one another. Rhetorical approaches to language have, since ancient Greece, been the dominant approach for educating language-users in the western educational curriculum [1].

Toward a unified theory of visual-verbal strategies in communication design

This paper presents a descriptive framework for modeling the visual designers rhetorical strategies. Revising and extending the theory of representational composition postulated by David Kaufer and his colleagues, visual communication artifacts are described in terms of types of audience experiences created through small units of visual decisions, including the choice and use of images, layout, and typography. The framework is intended to provide professional and technical communicators with a metalanguage that enables them to articulate the rhetorical appropriateness of visual choices. The framework is also used to develop a better understanding of visual design strategies that are commonly used by authors/designers to create communication artifacts that are created for similar rhetorical situations.

Chapter 9: Mining Textual Knowledge for Writing Education and Research: The DocuScope Project

This chapter reviews progress on a new corpus-based text analysis technology developed at Carnegie Mellon, called DocuScope. It describes a new technology used to support research and education involving digitized text, especially corpus-based rhetorical analysis and on-line writing education. The first half of the chapter lays out an overview of analytic choices we have made for conducting textual research. The second half of the chapter explores how the knowledge derived from the DocuScope tool can benefit writing education and the evaluation of writing curricula. The chapter overviews different frameworks and describes a specific system as a result of the choices that confronted us within the space of these frameworks. It overviews some applications of our system, notably using student samples both to evaluate and improve writing instruction and writing curricula itself. Keywords: analytic choices; corpus-based rhetorical analysis; digitized text; DocuScope; on-line writing education; student samples; textual research; writing curricula

A model of aesthetic experience

In this paper, I argue that the field of technical and professional communication lacks an adequate framework for integrating aesthetics into its pedagogy. I introduce Zangwills model of aesthetics as a framework for developing the pedagogy of technical and professional communication. I report on the use of the framework in a document design project, and suggest a future direction for involving aesthetics in the pedagogy of technical and professional communication.

Designing an engaging digital learning tool: A report on a motivation study and its impact on the design of an online learning tool

Communication skills are critical to the success of students entering the working world as professional engineers because effective writing underpins many of their duties. Unfortunately, engineering curricula are usually filled with discipline-specific courses, leaving little room for communication-related electives. Some engineering programs have started to integrate communication instruction into their existing curricula. However, subject instructors frequently struggle to teach communication skills in their courses as lessons often extend beyond their areas of expertise, and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) programs are not available at every school. Our project addresses this problem through the development of an online self-learning resource that incorporates video lessons, self-assessment activities, and hands-on exercises. This paper describes a major challenge that we encountered while testing our online self-learning resource-motivating students to try the tool when they are not required to use it-and how we addressed the problem by conducting a testing exercise of motivation approaches that lead us to modify the ways we engage students in the online self-learning resource.

Toward a strategic theory of communication design

As technical communication in the contemporary world becomes more complex and globalized, there is a need for a theoretical framework that captures the general building blocks of communication strategies. In this article I first identify three key dimensions of communication strategies and then situate communication strategy in the literature of rhetorical invention. I contend that previous scholars have not paid close attention to the notion of strategy as an explicit theoretical construct, despite extensive discussion on rhetorical invention over the past two millennia. To fill this gap in the research, I postulate a strategic theory of communication design by extending the theory of representational composition. The theory is intended to provide (a) communicators with “common” conceptual building blocks for developing their communication strategies, and (b) analysts with a means to uncover strategies found in existing communication artifacts.