Awkward multimodality
In academia, there is a bias in favor of text: journal articles are valued more than conference talks, a text citation is preferred to a citation from a lecture, oral presentations at conferences are called “papers”. When an image gets shown, it is rarely trusted by itself, and a verbal explanation is added. In humanities, many lectures are reduced to live readings of future articles. Yet speaking and reading don’t sound the same. Lecture is a multimodal format, where, besides the verbal mode, there are also intonation, gestures, images, sounds, facial expressions. In this drawing-based talk, I will suggest that when a piece of research has been at first reduced to the verbal mode, it might be difficult to add other modes later without them being auxiliary. I will also compare various presentation tools: how they influence the amount of text presented, how they encourage or hinder improvisation, and how this affects the attention of a speaker and listeners. I will also look into situations where text or speech is added to visual experiences in order to increase multimodality (labels added to artworks and guided tours in caves) and how some of such combinations can augment the overall experience while others diminish it.