can be seen as offering performative spaces for negotiating literary interpretations (6.3). Finally, I critically discuss the advantages and limitations of the methods used (6.4).
6.1 Transmediation as combining, juxtaposing and
symbolic responses through sketching and in their editing work. The actual sketching had a significant role in negotiating the thematic interpretation of the poem. By sketching the students needed to both articulate and reshape their thoughts, leading to a negotiation of the poetic text. They even encouraged and requested each other to substantiate their ideas by sketching them, indicating visual responses as a “tool for thinking” (see Whitin, 2005). Previous research on transmediation of literature through visual representation has emphasised the role of visual representation as “a tool for thinking”
(Whitin, 2005). Whitin found, in her study on the interplay of text, talk, and visual representation, how occasions when students collaboratively discussed their sketched responses to literature offered fresh perspectives on the literary text, expanded and revised their interpretations, and revisited the written text with new insights.
Mills’s (2011a) description of three key principles of transmediation regarding children’s multimodal and digital meaning-making highlights the discrete sign-making system inherent in software interfaces and the significance this has for digital text production. In this study, the editing programme played a crucial role in the students’ use of sound, providing them with a large set of different sound effects that expanded their digital video in terms of depth, ambiguousness, and possible interpretations. The recognition of semiotic resources in editing practices is also demonstrated in previous research, Gilje (2011) demonstrates how editing software becomes a “tool for thinking” that enables students to articulate and rephrase their ideas by making them observable in the interface of the editing programme, and argues that the feedback from the editing programme becomes a crucial phase in the students’ further reasoning about how to produce a particular scene.
The findings of this study illustrate the specific affordances, and possibly limitations, of working with a particular composing tool, as shown in previous studies. Jocius (2013) finds that the particular affordances of each composing tool (Power Point presentation and digital video software) influence the type of content the students present, and the tone and mood of their presentations, which led to a vast difference in use of and main emphasis on modes. That brings
forth how the choice of compositional tools highly influences the semiotic resources the students use for meaning-making. Ranker (2008) called for further research on the different multimedia composing programmes or environments and their role in the multimodal (or multimedial, as Ranker uses) composing process. An understanding of these processes could lead to a metalanguage about multimodal and multimedial composing, which would be of importance for educators intending to address and incorporate these kinds of composing processes in a pedagogical context.
As mentioned earlier, not only do the different levels of text production influence each other, so do the different phases of the videomaking process. The students were instructed in a linear designing process; based on their initial responses they were to write a synopsis, which they were to develop into a storyboard that would serve as a base for their filming and eventually editing. The temporal steps in the designing process: writing a synopsis, making a storyboard, filming, and editing, might seem – and also to some extent are – sequential and following one another. But the findings also demonstrate how issues are recurring, for example how the synopsis is rewritten when the students redesign their ideas in regard to the use of moving image, and how to depict exclusion using moving images instead of pictorial sketching. Thus, there is reason to review the designing process as linear and, instead of considering the designing process as a sequential series of steps, to view it is as a simultaneous, recursive process involving repeated adjustments of ideas contingent on which semiotic resources are at hand and in use.
These findings also reflect previous research on how a digital designing process is nonlinear. Ranker (2008) observed how two students in their digital video composing process constantly were changing visual representation, which gave them insight into what needed to be modified next. By interacting with, acquiring new information, and rewriting their video, the students in Ranker’s study became engaged in changing and shaping their video across time, based on the visual feedback they received from the video in progress.
Similarly, the analysis in this study shows how the different phases of
the videomaking process make the designing process a complex and nonlinear trajectory, and not at all fixed and ready-made.
Studies demonstrate how transmediation from one sign system to another expands the interpretive potential of the text under examination (see e.g. Carey, 2012; Hadjioannou & Hutchinson, 2014;
McCormick, 2011; Semali, 2002; Siegel, 1995; Smagorinsky &
O’Donnell-Allen, 1998; Whitin, 2005). The analyses and findings of this study extend previous studies by pointing out in detail how the different modes and mediums influence the possibilities to engage in interpretive acts during the complex process of transmediating from poem to digital video. Based on an interpretation of the analyses, I propose that the transmediation process offers opportunities to respond to the literary text by combining, juxtaposing, and emphasising different interpretations of the text. I the next section I will elaborate on such instances and practices in the students’
transmediation process.
Combining, juxtaposing, and emphasising different interpretations
The combining of different interpretations is noticeable in the students collaborative sketching in response to the poem. As the students discuss the poem, they sketch exploratory pictorial images on paper and this sketching is characterised by the students representing their interpretations symbolically through the use of symbols as helmet, fog, façade, and blanket. The work with imagery, the sketching of symbols, serves both as a way of co-constructing and as a way of communicating their reading of the poem; by sketching they are combining their own thought with the others’ thoughts and jointly building collective interpretations of the poem. Yet, the sketching requests negotiation as the students through their symbolic representation respond to each other’s visual representations and, thus, juxtapose or confirm them to their own thoughts. The sketching functions as a mean to communicate and negotiate, not as a means to
present a fully settled idea, and the sketching prompts the students combining and juxtaposing their interpretations.
The students’ work with interpreting and representing the poetic voice is an illustration of transmediation as emphasising different interpretations. The findings show how the students throughout the whole transmediation process emphasise different interpretations of the poetic voice as both male and female, and also gender-neutral.
The process of transmediating during all the different phases of the process prompts a continuous negotiation and is related to the different semiotic resources in use. Surely the mediums and modes both enabled and constrained the students and while the different modes and mediums, especially the use of moving images, did not make the representation of the poetic voice as neutral-gendered easier for these students, it did not obstructed them from emphasising different interpretations. Even at the very end of the process, presenting and summing up their work for the art teacher, the students emphasise the possibility of different interpretations of the poetic voice. As Catrin explains:
The person is homosexual […] cannot show who she really is, or he, and well then she breaks free anyway, or he, and dares to show who she is. […] Or he. But we have made it to be a she. […] in both the film and the drawing.” (see excerpt 14 for intact excerpt).
Although the modes and mediums both enable and constrain the students in their work, in this particular matter it does not seem to close the possibility for different interpretation.
The emphasising of different interpretations is also visible in the students’ interpretation of theme and motif as the students thematic interpretation of showing one’s true self brings up identity explorations, exemplified as but not limited to, revealing one’s sexual orientation. The theme of showing one’s true self could appear in several ways and the students’ digital video with its openness and ambiguousness is an example of emphasising different interpretations.
The use of the poem in voice-over, as well as the students’ meticulous work with matching the voice-over with the visual material, indicate that the poem is of importance to the overall meaning of the digital video, not just a prompt or a point of departure to be inspired by.
Noticeable is also how the students substantiate their responses by referring to the poem, particularly during the first phases of initial responses and writing of synopsis and making the storyboard. They are continuously reading and re-reading the poem in their attempt to co-construct meaning for the literary text. This way of substantiating their interpretations does not, using Faust’s (2000) terms, reflect the courtroom metaphor with consistent reference to textual evidence as an end in itself, a procedure aligning with the notion that literary texts bear witness to hidden meanings that can be revealed through questioning and cross-examination. Rather, it illuminates the social spaces where they “speak up to account for their own reading and listen up to what others have to say about their experiences with literature (Faust, 2000, p. 29; italics in original); an approach of emphasising different interpretations.