9.1 Forms of Remediation

What Is Remediation?

Remediation is the process of adapting a text, whether it is a newspaper article, a story, a film, or even a business proposal or report, into a new medium. Remediation is based on the idea of the famous media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who once said that “the medium is the message.” McLuhan meant that how we perceive information changes based on the way it is presented. To acquire cultural significance, new media may revise, repurpose, remix, reference, and/or compete with older media. Remix, one of the tools students use most often in remediation, is altering a work from its original state by adding, removing, and/or changing pieces of the item.

Let’s think about an example of a text that underwent several rounds of remediation. In the late 1930s, the novelist and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo read an article about the Prince of Wales paying a visit to a hospital in Canada for veterans of the First World War and meeting a soldier who had lost all of his limbs and senses from an explosion. From that inspiration, Trumbo wrote his most famous novel, Johnny Got His Gun, about a soldier who wakes up in a hospital to find his arms and legs amputated and that he is blind, deaf, and mute. It was published in 1939 to great success and in 1971 was adapted into a film that has since become a classic. But the adaptations didn’t stop there: it was also turned into a play in 1981, and it was the inspiration for Metallica’s 1989 song “One,” with scenes from the 1971 movie appearing in the music video.

These adaptations are examples of the remediation process at work. Each of the artists behind these adaptations had to make decisions about how to adapt the idea behind the source material to create their own vision for the work. By telling the same story through each of their respective art forms, these artists were able to present a new interpretation of the original story, each of which gives us a new lens through which to understand the soldier’s experience.

Let’s think about this in terms that you might be more familiar with: many of you have probably had to write a paper for which you had to give an oral report that included a PowerPoint presentation and possibly a handout. Each of those elements, the report, the PowerPoint, and the presentation, is a remediation of your original paper. You would not present information in the same way in a PowerPoint presentation as you would on a handout or when delivering the content verbally. Because of the changes you make from one medium to the next, your audience perceives the information differently based on how it is delivered.

Below, we’ll outline several categories of remediation to get you thinking about what might best suit your project: Straightforward Representation, Enhancement, Transformation, Text-to-Visual, and Text-to-Text.

Straightforward Representation

Older media can be represented in digital form using a photo or scanned image without apparent irony or critique, as exemplified by The Collection Online [Website] from the Guggenheim:

“Featuring nearly 1,700 artworks by more than 625 artists, the Collection Online presents a searchable database of selected artworks from the Guggenheim’s permanent collection of over 7,000 artworks” (“Collection Online”).

Remediation in this case enables media to be shared with a larger audience and viewed apart from the limitations of place and time that exist in the real world.

Enhancement

At other times, remediations may pay homage to older media while also working to enhance or improve upon them.

For example, “Snow Fall” by John Branch [Website] is a multimedia webtext that uses graphic, video, and interactive elements to compose a feature news article. Published by The New York Times in 2012, “Snow Fall” highlights the potential of digital composing environments and tools to bring stories to life. Here’s what Branch said about “Snow Fall” in an interview for the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative [Website]:

“‘Snow Fall worked because of the multimedia . . . in a lot of ways.’ Graphic elements ‘show you what the mountain looked like, show you the heart-wrenching interviews of the survivors.’ That is, ‘Everything in the story helped the reader understand the story better.’”

Transformation

Remediation may also “try to refashion the older medium or media entirely, while still marking the presence of the older media and therefore maintaining a sense of multiplicity or hypermediacy.”

Pinterest [Website] presents a good example of remediating cookbooks and cooking magazines, as the above example shows. Recipes (or links to recipes) are remediated into pins that feature visually stunning food photography. Site users can then like, share, comment on, or save these pins to return to later.

Text-to-Visual

Another type of remediation occurs when you translate text into either a single image or a series of images (a video or slideshow). These two types of remediations fundamentally involve the same process—translating text into visuals.

There are no strict guidelines by which this translation must be done. However, there are some large-scale suggestions or methods by which you can attempt to symbolically capture in visuals the messages and main ideas promoted in your original text. Moreover, the creation of a visual remediation—much in the same manner as the creation of a text remediation—involves an understanding of rhetorical stance and rhetorical strategies.

Obviously, in any type of remediation, you, as a composer, must pay attention to purpose and audience. Pictures and videos are media that are less exclusive in their target audiences than text-based media (after all, you need not be able to read in order to comprehend a visual image). At the same time, you must be cognizant, as in text-to-text remediations, of the purpose of the original text and consider how best to capture that purpose in your remediation.

Symbolically Capturing a Message

The purpose of a text-to-visual remediation is to convey the main ideas of the text with the use of visual images.

For example, if one wants to remediate Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech into a set of images, one first needs to break down that speech into a few main themes or concepts. These might include the ideas that:

• all people are equal,
• skin color is no way to judge a person, and
• assessing character is the proper way to judge a person.

But how might a student portray those main ideas through visuals? Any number of possibilities present themselves to answer that question. A common thread that links the options lies in attempting to translate concepts like equality and character into distinct symbols. You might attempt to express equality in an image by presenting a diverse group of people standing on the same ground to highlight their similarity and parity.

Though remediation is a subjective distillation and representation of a particular set of ideas expressed in the original text, in order to effectively use symbols, a knowledge of some basic symbols and what those symbols often represent may be useful. Water, the color red, and the sun all have distinct and common meanings: rebirth, anger, and life, respectively. You should also consider the connotations certain colors have for your audience—colors have different meanings in different cultures, for example. You should avoid creating symbols that need extensive or excessive explanation—an excellent visual remediation should clearly and interestingly capture the essential themes or ideas of the original text.

Rhetorical stance is not only tied to the creation of text. The creation of visuals (whether a single image or a video, or a combination of text and image) is governed by many of the same rhetorical considerations as the construction of text—a knowledge of target audience, the purpose behind these visuals, the tone or feel of the images—and you should constantly keep this in mind when constructing a text-to-visual remediation.

Remember, your remediation should be an expression of your feelings about a particular text, but it should be rooted in an understanding of the original text, including the historical context out of which it came, and an application of rhetorical strategies—knowledge that you should be able to eloquently defend in a reflection piece on the remediation.

Consider Together: “The Road Not Taken” by Andrew Callaghan

Watch the brief video below in which Andrew Callaghan reads the Robert Frost poem “The Road Not Taken [Website]” over a series of images with his own original music composition playing in the background.

1. What kinds of feelings and thoughts does the video evoke?
2. Who do you believe is the target audience for this video? What elements of the video lead you to this conclusion?
3. How does Callaghan’s remediation add to and/or change the meaning of the original poem?

Text-to-Text Remediation

Instead of remediating a print text into a visual or audio text, you may choose to use a different genre within the print medium. For example, if your original text is a poem, you might want to remediate that poem into song lyrics, a children’s book, a letter, or another print genre. Before you construct your text-to-text remediation, consider the following:

Capturing Content

Before you can create any type of effective or meaningful remediation, you should develop a good understanding of your original text. Your remediation, after all, is based on your decoding of the messages and meanings—the textual content—of your original text. You would be hard-pressed to effectively argue, for example, that Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is a strongly worded argument against racial equality because even a basic understanding of King’s speech illustrates that he was making the opposite point. In other words, you want to be sure that you have accurately captured the central idea(s) in the original text. Moreover, in the creation of your text-based remediation, you should suggest ideas that are similar to the ideas in the original text—if, to continue the MLK Jr., example, you choose to remediate the text of that particular speech into song lyrics, then you should capture the meaning of that speech (equality and a brighter future for the next generation, perhaps) in the lyrics of your song.

Purpose

Ask yourself the following question: “What is the main purpose of the text?” If the original text is a poem that seems to advocate an anti-war message, you can surmise that the poem’s purpose is to capture a reader’s attention through attractive writing and to persuade the reader that war is to be avoided. There is a distinct connection between a text’s purpose and the medium in which it is presented: an opinion column in a newspaper is traditionally a type of text where serious issues are addressed with a central purpose of convincing others to agree with a particular point of view. In this way, medium and purpose are inextricably linked. As you analyze the text that you want to remediate, try to express the purpose of this text: Does it aim to entertain, to enrage, to convince, or cause reflection? And, more to the point, in what ways is that purpose reinforced or modified by the medium that the text uses?

Likewise, when creating your text-based remediation, consider how you want to manipulate the purpose of the text. A blog post in an online forum that urges people to stop the Iraq war could be remediated in a number of ways, but be mindful that the main purpose of that text is to persuade or convince—a purpose that demands a different rhetorical approach than a text which wishes only to entertain. What this example illustrates, hopefully, is that purpose is inseparable from medium, audience, and rhetorical stance, and an awareness of purpose should be something that governs a writer’s remediation process.

Image Descriptions

Figure 9.1. A webpage screenshot from the Guggenheim site. Across the top, colored tabs read NEW YORK, VENICE, BILBAO, ABU DHABI, INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS, GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION, above a main menu: visit, support, calendar & events, about, exhibitions, collections, education, online, press room, shop. A sub-menu shows ABOUT THE COLLECTION, COLLECTION ONLINE (selected), CONSERVATION, LIBRARY & ARCHIVES. The headline reads: Collection Online. Left sidebar link: Learn More about the Collection. The body text explains that the Collection Online is a searchable database featuring nearly 1,700 artworks by 575+ artists, drawn from a permanent collection of 7,000+ works, spanning the late 19th century to today, and regularly expanded. It includes highlights from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice), and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Visitors can browse by artist, date, artwork type, movement, or groups of acquisitions since 1937. The section header includes: Browse the Collection Online, followed by pill-style buttons: Artists, Dates, Mediums, Movements, Venues, Special Collections, and a Search button. Below this, there are two thumbnails. On the left, a staged workspace scene with white desks and boxes with assorted objects stacked on and around them. On the right, a grid of rectangular stone-like tiles in varied pastel and earth tones. [Return to Figure 9.1]

Figure 9.2. Screenshot of a New York Times feature page with a pale snow-slope header image; upper left shows “The New York Times,” upper right shows a comment bubble with “1156” and share icons; centered text on the image reads “Snow Fall,” subtitle “The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” and “By JOHN BRANCH”; below, the story begins with a large drop cap “T” and two sentences of body text: “The snow burst through the trees with no warning but a last-second whoosh of sound, a two-story wall of white and Chris Rudolph’s piercing cry: ‘Avalanche! Elyse!’ The very thing the 16 skiers and snowboarders had sought — fresh, soft snow — instantly became the enemy. Somewhere above, a pristine meadow cracked in the shape of a lightning bolt, slicing a slab nearly 200 feet across and 3 feet deep. Gravity did the rest.” [Return to Figure 9.2]

Figure 9.3. Screenshot of a Pinterest results page with the search bar showing dessert; a masonry grid of colorful food pins fills the screen, including text on cards such as Easter Dessert Goals – lark & linen, Chocolate Mint Brownies, Mini Cheesecakes with Oreo crust, Easter dirt cake, Celebration Marble Cupcakes, S’mores Sugar Cookie Pie, MOCHA CHOCOLATE ICEBOX CAKE, Mini-Eggs Brownie Parfait, Lighter Mini Cheesecakes with Oreo Crust, Reese’s BROWNIES with PEANUT BUTTER BUTTERCREAM, and the best LEMON (partial). Icons and counters for saves/comments appear on various pins, and small profile/source lines (e.g., from Lil’ Luna, from Two Sisters Crafting, from Crazy for Crust) are visible beneath several cards. [Return to Figure 9.3]