A framework for recognizing the author’s rhetorical strategies for creating a felt experience

Imagine you are reading an entry in an online discussion group, and you sense that the author is threatening (or flaming). Or, you are flipping through a news magazine and stop at a page, and sense that the author is directly talking to you. You may pick up a brochure in your mailbox, and recognize intuitively that it is about negative values in our society. These feelings are not about the specific content. Instead, they are feelings about types of experiences the audience has had. This project aims to develop a computational method for recognizing the audience’s experience that is felt through visual verbal communication, such as letters, magazine articles and brochures. In this presentation, we introduce a theoretical framework for modeling the author’s rhetorical strategies through visual and verbal design choices that are used to create such feelings in the audience. An experimental computer-based flame detection program, one potential application area of this framework, will be demonstrated.

This framework is rooted in the notion of representational composition postulated in Designing Interactive Worlds with Words: Principles of Writing as Representational Composition by Kaufer and Butler. In this work, text is viewed as a representation of the world experienced by the reader, where the term world is used in a broader sense—including the external (physical and social) world, the private minds of the author and third party individuals, as well as the way the author relates to and interacts with the audience. Kaufer et al. take this framework of representation further in Power of Words: Unveiling the writer and speaker’s hidden craft [5] and develop a specific set types of reader experiences that can be created in a text. This work parallels the recent findings in cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics, which suggest that one’s language ability develops through a number of situated exposures to language patterns within a community of language users. In this book, we suggest that not only do speakers and writers choose appropriate language patterns (i.e., strings of words) that represent the meaning of what they intend to communicate (i.e., content), they also select those patterns according to how the reader experiences the content.

Bio

Suguru Ishizaki is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communication Design in the Department of English at Carnegie Mellon. Before this appointment, he worked at QUALCOMM on the research and development of mobile user interfaces. Prior to that, he was on the faculty of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon. His professional experience ranges from user interface design to information visualization to traditional print design. His current research focuses on visual communication pedagogy for non-designers--including the development of intelligent critiquing systems and assessment methods. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. at MIT's Media Laboratory, after receiving his Bachelor of Art & Design from Tsukuba University, Japan. He is the author of Improvisational Design: Continuous Responsive Digital Communication, and a co-author of The Power of words: Unveiling the Speaker and Writer's Hidden Craft.