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Davis & Yancey on Materiality

“These three stories, however, were not immediately apparent to me when I initially encountered the scrapbook, which I found on the web, and like any good web reader, I invented my own progress through the materials. In other words, my reading of the scrapbook did not follow the linear logic of the physical scrapbook, but rather, linking my 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—is remediated on the book: like the book, a scrapbook in its physical form “proceeds in a linear fashion from beginning to end” (Yancey, 2004, p. 748). It privileges the composer’s perspective, and although in theory a reader may move through a scrapbook hypertextually, the linear arrangement of the scrapbook argues for a beginning-to-end reading.”

Davis, Matthew, and Kathleen Blake Yancey. “Notes Toward the Role of Materiality in Composing, Reviewing, and Assessing Multimodal Texts.” Computers and Composition 31: 13-28.