Nasir's Digital Writing Log

Accessibility and User Experience   The final module for the ENGL 307T course revolves primarily around three concepts: accessibility (allowing for a disabled populace to properly access and use an online space, via alternate settings for the movement, sight, or hearing-impaired), usability (designing a webpage to be effective and satisfying for the general population, which often doesn't include the disabled community), and inclusion (ensuring that everybody gets an equal experience in the online space, regardless of education, age, place of birth, etc.) (Henry et. al, 2010). As times have started to grow more tolerant of the disabled, these three qualities are rapidly becoming major priorities for companies, with online businesses being no different. After all, alienating a good portion of the population (read: potential customers) would lead to a loss of profit and poor PR for the company. In fact, it brings to mind an article that I have read in the past, in which a blind fan o...

  Writing and Designing in the Public Sphere Week 5's module centers around the concept of "visual rhetoric", which is commonly used to describe the concept of influencing people's minds and beliefs via the usage of different symbols. In today's world, where humanity's attention span is rapidly dwindling and dwindling, big and bold symbols are one of the main things that can draw an audience's attention, regardless of the medium or career utilizing them. Something displaying visual rhetoric has these three concepts in mind: symbolic action (featuring a tenuous and arbitrary relationship to the concept it is trying to symbolize, such as doves and peace, as displayed in the image above), human intervention (which requires human action to transform non-rhetorical objects into something rhetorical, such as doves quickly becoming associated with peace by the masses), and the presence of an audience, whether authentic or pretend (or online, as is the case with t...

  Digital & Visual Rhetoric Week 4 deals with the concept of "rhetoric" (which are the methods needed in order to communicate a message to others) and the literacy needed to both understand and implement them into the creation of a webpage, in order to communicate one's desired point to an online audience. Particular emphasis was placed on the importance of digital rhetoric and the knowledge needed to properly communicate one's point using multimedia elements, with colors, layout, graphics, and audiovisual implements being just as important as the words communicating the message. As discussed in my previous posts, proper digital rhetoric should allow for the author of a webpage to facilitate communication and collaboration with their prospective viewers, especially considering how online mediums give the reader more agency than their own author. The three primary modes of operation for digital rhetoric are the following: audiences stance (how the audience is invit...

  Authorship and Social Production The module's third week primarily deals with the concept of "co-authorship" that is displayed in online spaces, and how it differs from the authorship being displayed in analogue spaces. While a book has a set order that the writer wants the reader to follow, which allows the author to have a high amount of authority. In contrast to a book, a webpage is far less linear (allowing the reader to interact with the blog however they want), which allows for the reader to have more authority, at the expense of the author. Attention was also drawn to how one can be expected to display and facilitate collaborative efforts over the internet, in addition to persuading, engaging and enacting a stance for prospective readers (Adlington & Feez, 2019). Two of the primary displays of co-authorship on the internet are comments and tags, serving as a techno-semiotic method of communication, on a blog such as this one. Tags function as both a label and...