Definitions and a historical background

1. Historical points of reference regarding “literacy” and “literacies”

NB Bibliographical references, point 4.

Oral expression has always been the most immediate way for humans to communicate. Through diverse times and civilizations, images and writing have had different impacts, depending on the cultural framework. Only Western culture, during a relatively short period (approximately 1850-1980 C.E.), convinced itself that writing was the absolute means of communication.

This conviction took root from a coined term - literacy - born during the time when mass-scholarization was established, in the middle of the 19th century (Barnton, 2007). It was devised as a unique concept opposing the technologies of written culture and other types of culture characterized by the key role of orality. According to Jack Goody’s definition, literacy refers to praxis in its entirety and representations related to writing, including writing material conditions as well as intellectual products. The term “literacy” reflects the Power of the Written Tradition (Goody, 2000). The modern Western conviction of the supremacy of the printed written text has been so powerful that historians have retro-projected the notion of “literacy” onto other periods and cultures (Clivaz, 2013). The example of Antiquity illustrates this bias.

When the Classicist William Harris, in his leading work Ancient Literacy (1989), defined “literacy” as the ability to read and write, he was reading Antiquity data from a modern background. He anachronistically translated an expression, “the learning by letters”, as “literacy” in a passage by Diodorus of Sicilus, historian of the 1st century: “For who could compose a worthy encomium of literacy [tes ton grammaton mathesis]? For it is by means of writing alone that the dead are brought to the minds of the living” (Diodorus, Bib. XII,13; Harris 1989).

Through this choice of translation, Harris gave the impression that “literacy” had existed as a thoroughgoing category in Antiquity according to the singular modern notion of printed literacy. However, the Platonician mistrust of writing was largely present in Antiquity, whereas orality was highly valued (Junod, 2013). In a 1946 translation by Lamar Crosby, there is another striking example of the modern misunderstanding of Ancient culture in the mistranslation of “music” as “poetry” to qualify Homer’s work. An orator of the first century CE, Dio Chrysostom, evokes Homer’s work as “music” in his Discourse 53:7. Homeric poetry was sung in Antiquity, a fact that we have seemingly forgotten. Lamar Crosby was unable to honor this musical feature of Homeric culture; he translated the Ancient Greek word ‘music’ as ‘poetry’: “For example, it is said that Homer's poetry is sung even in India, where they have translated it into their own speech and tongue […]: so remarkable has been the spell of one man's poetry [musike]!” (Dio Chrysostom, Discourse 53: 7; Crosby, 1946).

With the notion of literacy’s “printed cradle” in mind, one can only agree with the Classicists William Johnson and Holt Parker when they refer to plural literacies for Antiquity (2009); anthropologists had already used similar notions regarding non-Western cultures (Collins, 1995). Johnson and Parker argue that in reference to the ancient world, when readers and writers were not numerous, the concept of literacies should go beyond the importance of writing. This is required for one to take full account of oral and visual technologies, as well as social, economic and political interactions. Thanks to ethnologists, Classicists and anthropologists, we are able to consider other ways of cultural communication than writing and printing. This raises the question: is there a relationship between our present awareness of plural literacies and digital culture? In 1998, Synder was already claiming that “the use of these [new] technologies produces new literacies which we are only beginning to identify and describe” (Synder, 1998). How can we try to evaluate the influence of digital environments on our cultural perceptions, without overestimating or underestimating it?

2. The role of the digital age towards an awareness of the plural literacies

The enthusiasm for digital culture can easily and often lead to a misconception: to attribute any kind of cultural transformation to the digital turn. As an example, before digital writing material, we did not have a way to consume and produce multimodal cultures. Furthermore, sensitivity to the differences existing in writing, speaking and drawing was already at stake before the rise of digital writing. Due to the influence of the dominant period of Western printed culture (1850-1980 CE) we were made to forget that writing is neither the unique nor the most obvious way to express cultures.

The 60s showed that important voices were again becoming sensitive to the plurality of literacies. In Digital Humanities scholarship, it is known that during this period, Marshall McLuhan, with his 1964 monograph, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, drew attention to the way that media transmits messages. The same year, Robert Escarpit published a fiction novel, Le Littératron, which contains the idea of a machine that writes novels. In the same 60s period, the French historian Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie claimed that “the historian of the future will be a programmer or won’t be” (1968). In 1967, Roland Barthes published the first English version of his milestone article “The Death of the Author”, in a white box on the floating, non-numbered pages of an experimental journal, Aspen (1967). This experimental journal was composed of diverse cultural objects: sculptures, drawings, texts, and recorders. All these examples illustrate that in the second part of the 20^th century, something had begun to change in the Western relationship to text and textuality.

Roland Barthes has in particular focused not only on the gap existing between oral speech and written discourse, but also between images and written discourse. At the beginning of an ARTE movie, in an abstract of an interview, he declares: “I have a profound belief in an absolutely dizzying gap, almost demoniacal, between subject who is speaking, on the one hand, and the subject who is writing, on the other hand” (Thomas and Thomas, 2015). [NB: This sentence is present (in French) at the beginning of a 2015 movie. If one begins to understand what the implications of having multimodal access to knowledge are, you should be tempted to stop to read this text, and to listen to the voice of Roland Barthes. Or you can continue to read the text below.]

Roland Barthes claimed that images would have “the last word” (Barthes, 1995). Barthes died in 1980 in a car accident, leaving his work unfinished: he had been preparing a seminar at the College de France about Paul Nadar diapositives. According to Cassegrin, the entire Barthes work can be reconsidered through the lens of the image (Cassegrin, 2015). Barthes' example clearly underlines that thinkers did not wait for the digital turn to consider orality and visuality next to textuality, even after several centuries of printed cultures. At the same time, it also shows that to consider the synergies between texts, images and sounds is something challenging, something that only digital culture allows now with such an intensity and in myriads of new expression possibilities.

Preceding scholars, artists have begun to explore this dimension, notably in rap music video clips where images, written text and oral text interact with eachother. Writers are also producing multimodal digital objects, with music, oral text, written text and images, as exemplified by a cultural production by the French writer François Bon, “Là où le monde double s'effondre”, which will be commented on in Unit II. Là où le monde double s’effondre
François Bon, Tiers Livre: http://www.tierslivre.net – vidéo #456 (standard YouToube License)

These multimodal cultural productions are particularly demanding in terms of attention, adaptation, speed, and flexibility. Multimodality is always challenging, even when fewer interactions are present in a work such as Pablo Neruda, “If you forget me". If you forget me

Poem "If You Forget Me" by Pablo Neruda, read by Madonna (standard YouTube License)

This video creates one stable image: a voice reading the written text. Even in this case, multimodality requires particular attention from the readers/users since we are simply not used to deciphering such cultural productions. As likely reactions to this overwhelming multimodal digital wave, diverse cultural productions are focusing only on one mode; on sounds for example : the Maison de la Poésie in Paris proposes “sound snacks” or artists propose to listening to Classical music concert with hidden eyes. In #dariahTeach, an entire course is devoted to “Sound studies” (Course 5), underlining an increasing need in the academic sphere for attention to also be paid to singular modes of cultural production.

We all experiment everyday with how we are constantly distracted by digital multimodal expressions: how can we deal with our “ancient brains in a high-Tech world” according to the subtitle of a recent book (Gazzaley and Rosen 2016)? Was it possible for you to read this text while paying continuous attention to it and without clicking on the two YouTube video links above? If you clicked on the links, note that it was neither requested, nor mandatory to understand the text! We are now multimodal users as soon as we read online. It is impossible to escape this dimension.

Neither can we escape the question of digital distraction, nor can we escape multimodal digital literacies.  Academic multimodal publications are emerging, as Unit II and III will show. Interestingly, pedagogy and teaching are suitable spaces in which to try keep these two challenges together. Let’s see in the last part of this text how attention to multimodal literacy/ies has emerged and joined the digital humanities space thanks to pedagogy.

3. Pedagogy and multimodal literacies

As a 2004 Unesco report reminds us, “over the past few decades, the conception of literacy has moved beyond its simple notion as the set of technical skills of reading, writing and calculating – the so-called “three Rs” – to a plural notion encompassing the manifold meanings and dimensions of these undeniably vital competencies. […] There are many practices of literacy embedded in different cultural processes, personal circumstances and collective structures. Nonetheless, much remains to be done to incorporate this new thinking in literacy policies and programmes”.

Such an evolution explains that the preoccupation with multiliteracies started in education, outside of the Humanities and Computing fields, before the expression “digital humanities” was born. In 1996, the Harvard Educational Review published an article illustrating how literacy pedagogy in a digital age can reflect societal changes such as globalization, technology and increasing cultural and social diversity (New London Group, 1996). In relation to digital culture, «multiliteracies» are here associated with «multiculturality» and «interdisciplinarity». Some years later, Tanya Clement drew a picture of DH pedagogy, and chose «multiliteracies» as a core term to define or gather together the different aspects of digital pedagogy (Clement 2012).

By making such a choice, she remains very close to the definition of the 1996 HER article, insisting on diversity in literacy modalities, on multiculturalism and interdisciplinarity. She discusses diverse DH pedagogies, such as new media studies, and game studies, by looking to multiliteracies “that are engaged within undergraduate humanities curricula through general skills, principles and habits of mind that allow students to progress within and engage society in the twenty-first century”. According to Tanya Clement, multiliteracies – or multimodal literacies – can thus summarize many features of digital pedagogy: multiculturalism and interdisciplinarity are consequently general effects of multiliteracies.

Multimodal literacies appear thus to be a central notion for considering DH pedagogy and new formats of publication or expression. They typically belong, for example, to William G. Thomas III’s definition of “digital narratives”: 

“These scholarly works are born-digital, and they primarily feature a work of scholarly interpretation or argument embedded within layers of evidence and citation. They do not and presumably cannot exist in analog form. They may be multimodal, multi-authored and user-directed. They may change between and among readings, either through updates or algorithmic reconstitutions. Unlike the first generation of “e-books”, which transferred analog books into digital formats, these nonlinear, multimodal narratives offer explicit hypertext structures. These works primarily provide multiple points of entry for readers and situate evidence and interpretation in ways that allow readers to unpack the scholarly work. They are highly configured, deeply structured and strongly interpretive pieces of scholarship. They could be standalone self-generating web sites, cloud applications, or presented in a media-rich scholarly publishing framework such as Scalar” (Thomas III 2016).

In generally describing the new born-digital narratives, Thomas III concludes by pointing to a multimodal digital publishing tool, Scalar (presented in Unit III). This verification offers a good provisionary conclusion to this introductory text: multimodal literacies are one of the main new features that has been introduced by digital culture. They will be increasingly present in all digital cultural productions, and we are just beginning to try understanding how they produce sense and effects. Most of the time, teachers and students are learning all together from this emerging topic.

4. References

Barthes, Roland. 1967. “The Death of the Author.” Aspen 5–6: n. p.

———. 1995. Fragments D’un Discours Amoureux. Paris: Seuil.

Barton, David. 2007. Literacy. An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Cassegrin, Guillaume. 2015. Roland Barthes Ou L’image Advenue.

Chrysostomus, Dio. 1946. Discourses 37-60. Harvard University Press. LCL 376. Cambridge, Massachussets: Lamar Crosby.

Clement, Tanya. 2012. “Multiliteracies in the Undergraduate Digital Humanities Curriculum: Skills, Principles, and Habits of Mind.” In Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics, B. Hirsch, 365–88. Open Book Publishers.

Clivaz, Claire. 2013. “Literacy, Greco-Roman Egypt.” In The Encyclopedia of Ancient History, First Edition, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 4097–98. Oxford: R. S. Bagnall, K. Brodersen, C. B. Champion, A. Erskine and S. R. Huebner.

Collins, J. 1995. “Literacy and Literacies.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24.

Escarpit, Roger. 1964. Le Littératron. Flammarion. Paris.

Gazzaley, Adam, and Larry D. Rosen. 2016. The Distracted Mind. Ancient Brains In A High-Tech World. MIT Press. Boston.

Goody, Jack. 2000. The Power of the Written Tradition. Smithsonian Institution Press. Smithsonian Series in Ethnographic Inquiry. Washington DC.

Harris, Williams J. 1989. Ancient Literacy. Harvard University Press. Cambridge/London.

Junod, Eric. 2013. “On the Danger of Writing According to Origen.” In Writing the Bible, Scribes, Scribalism and Script, BibleWorld, 189–200. Acumen Publishing. Durham: P. Davies - T. Römer.

Leroy-Ladurie, Emmanuel. 1973. “L’historien et  L’ordinateur.” In Le Territoire et L’historien, Gallimard, 11–14. Paris.

McLuhan, M. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York & Toronto.

New London Group. 1996. “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” Harvard Educational Review 66 (1): 60–92.

Snyder, Ilana (ed.). 1998. Page to Screen. Taking Literacy Into the Electronic Era. Routledge. Cambridge & New York.

Thomas, Chantal, and Thierry Thomas. 2015. Roland Barthes, 1915-1980 - Le théâtre du langage. ARTE. https://vimeo.com/140413045.

Thomas III, William G. 2016. “The Promise of the Digital Humanities and the Contested Nature of Digital Scholarship.” In A New Compagnion to Digital Humanities, Wiley-Blackwell Press. Chichester: S. Schreibman, R. Siemens, J. Unsworth (eds.).

Unesco. 2004. “The Purality of Literacy and Its Implications for Policies and Programmes (Unesco Education Position Paper).” Paris, Unesco. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001362/136246e.pdf.