{"id":7230,"date":"2014-07-18T10:00:09","date_gmt":"2014-07-18T10:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/?p=7230"},"modified":"2024-10-16T11:46:04","modified_gmt":"2024-10-16T15:46:04","slug":"assembling-composition-session-f2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/2014\/07\/18\/assembling-composition-session-f2\/","title":{"rendered":"“Assembling Composition” ~ Session F2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Review by Rachael Ryerson<\/p>\n

Panelists<\/b>
\nStephen McElroy, Florida State University<\/i>
\nKathleen Yancey, Florida State University<\/i><\/p>\n

As their title suggests, both Stephen McElroy and Kathleen Yancey\u2019s presentations explore assemblage as both a practice of composing and as compositions in themselves. While their presentations could not be more different, with McElroy focusing on assemblage in postcard production and Yancey exploring tombstone assemblage, both presenters rely on Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart Selber\u2019s framework\/definition of assemblage:<\/p>\n

Assemblages are texts built primarily and explicitly from existing texts in order to solve a writing or communication problem in a new context. Under our definition, \u201cassemblage\u201d is itself constructed from the conceptual, linguistic, and sociopolitical forces active in several different locations. (381)<\/p>\n

Using this framework, both presenters offer assemblages that raise questions, much like Johnson-Eilola and Selber, about how we define composition(s) and composing practices\/processes.<\/p>\n

“Assembling Postcards, Postcards Assembling”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Stephen McElroy<\/a>, Florida State University<\/p>\n

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This image of the Open-Air Aquarium provided courtesy of State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory http:\/\/floridamemory.com\/items\/show\/142850
and
FSU Card Archive http:\/\/fsucardarchive.org<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Stephen McElroy, this year\u2019s winner, along with co-authors Michael Neal and Katherine Bridgman, of the Outstanding Digital Production\/Scholarship award, began his presentation with an image that toggled back and forth between a photo of Faith Hill and the heavily photoshopped photo that appeared on the July 2007 cover of Redbook Magazine. This stark difference between the original image and the published image was a perfect opener for McElroy\u2019s talk which investigated postcard production in the early twentieth century before the affordances of digital technology.<\/p>\n

For the bulk of his presentation, McElroy focused on Teich and Co.\u2019s postcard production methods, highlighting their methods\u2019 relationship with assemblage composing processes. McElroy noted that Teich and Co. was an innovator in the postcard industry, with color production processes being one of their major contributions to the industry. Thankfully, the company kept meticulous records and from these records, McElroy could trace Teich and Co.\u2019s material assemblage composing practices. After all, as he later remarks, postcard assemblage can act as a genealogy of composition that reveals its predecessors and progeny. McElroy explained how the company would often begin with a black-and-white photograph that they would use as a canvas to mark changes and\/or deletions for the final version. For example, the original photo of a street scene might have the unsightly telephone wires and poles literally painted over, and then this painted image would be photographed for the printing plate. In another example, directions to the artist for changes like \u201cadd bright colors on the girl\u201d or \u201cbring out the turtles in the water\u201d are left as notes on a tissue overlay on the original photo. McElroy deemed notes like these \u201cmaterial assemblage\u201d and as Johnson-Eilola and Selber do, these assemblages question the quiet myth of the lone genius creating an original text through their own effort.<\/p>\n

In a more specific example of collaborative composition, McElroy examined a fold-out postcard whose final look was achieved through an assemblage of already existent materials. These materials included a pre-existing folder postcard that served as a template for the postcard background and physical design (fold-out pattern), another postcard that was stapled to the back cover, a tissue overlay containing sketches and directions for the artist, and photographs taped together as examples of how the final layout should appear. Not only were postcards assembled from pre-existing materials, but they had rhetorical aims. McElroy explained as much in his discussion of Frank Johnson, a Florida businessman who published postcards promoting places like Key West because more people meant more potential customers for his Curios shop, The Bazaar, and his hotel.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, McElroy gathered that because assemblages are made from preexisting materials, it follows their ancestors and descendants can be traced, and for him, such tracing teaches us about the nature of composing processes. In an effort to summarize the import of assemblage more obliquely, McElroy ended his presentation with two quotes from Deleuze:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can only assemble among assemblages.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe writer invents assemblages starting from assemblages that have invented him.\u201d<\/p>\n

And like McElroy, I will leave you with those two thoughts.<\/p>\n

“Assembling Tombstones:Historical Practices, Mobile Markers, and Virtual Complements<\/b>“<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kathleen Yancey, Florida State University<\/p>\n

Instead of sifting through postcard archives, receipts, and artist directions, Kathleen Yancey investigated the historical assemblage of\/on tombstones. Yancey began her presentation echoing Johnson-Eilola and Selber\u2019s point that what we do with texts regarding plagiarism in schools is not what we do with texts in everyday writing, where assemblage and the borrowing of texts is commonplace. From there, Yancey offered tombstones as an example of everyday writing, assemblages of visual icons and borrowed text that create compositions challenging conventional notions of what equals an original text.<\/p>\n

Yancey began her discussion of tombstones with an example of a tombstone generator, which she argued is more fun than a \u201cbarrel of monkeys.\u201d Specifically, she demonstrated, using a Finnish website<\/a>, how a user can design their tombstone\u2019s composition, bringing together color, size, and shape to the font, symbols, and epitaph appearing on its surface.. For Yancey, the options afforded the user of this site suggest a recursive composing process of assembled, pre-existing materials. From this discussion, Yancey moved on to rhetorically analyze tombstones and their artifacts in a community cemetery in Emigrant, Montana, a town of 326 residents about 30 miles north of Yellowstone National Park.<\/p>\n

\"em.emigrant<\/p>\n

She theorized that this cemetery \u201cfunctions as a host of a five-part set of multi-layered compositions\u201d or assemblages through the following:<\/p>\n