#Multimodality

[beyond-mogai-pride-flags]

Sotrigender Pride Flag

Sotrigender or tritrisogender/trisotrigender: trimodal trigender in which someone is iso, trans, and cis; being trisogender as a result of being trigender; or being trigender as a result of being trisomodal.

[ronastudies]

As I am writing a paper on a very small little corner in the field of argumentation theory, I have of course come across multi-modal argumentation and Michael A. Gilbert. And since his papers are extremely fun to read (well-written, witty, nicely structured) and my professor had provided us with intriguing little stories about Gilbert's life (he is a cross-dresser and has been a trans activist for decades), I finally decided to look him up and found his website which contains a sub-page titled "The Absolute Truth". It is empty. This man is an absolute legend.

[digitalrevolutions]

Being, Thinking, and Knowing in a Hypertext Age

The speculative rhetorical model posits that we can only know the world in ways bounded and contextualized by our own experience of being. For this reason, a speculative rhetoric approach tries to pay careful attention to the perspectives, roles, and experiences of nonhumans, since communication inevitably takes place among a vast array of nonhuman actants. Speculative rhetorician Andrew Reid asserts that “A speculative rhetoric begins with recognizing that language is nonhuman.” At first, I couldn’t begin to imagine what this must mean. Sure, animals communicate, but surely language—expressive, symbolic communication with defined rules—must be an exclusively human phenomenon.

I read Reid’s short list of scholars cited (Alexander Galloway, Richard Grusin, Bruno Latour, Alan Lui, and Quentin Meillasoux) aloud to GPT-4 and asked it to tell me what they were known for, in hopes that knowing the background Reid was drawing from would help me contextualize such a bizarre statement.

It confirmed that Bruno Latour is best known for actor-network theory, as I had thought. Meillasoux it introduced as a speculative realist philosopher. Lui it defined as a scholar of “language as a digital-cultural phenomenon, influenced by both human creativity and digital technology.” Grusin, it said, was known for proposing that new technologies “remediate” and refashion older ones. Galloway, it said, “explores how digital protocols, the rules and standards governing digital networks, shape interactions and communications.” A quick look at Google Scholar and the scholars’ university webpages confirmed that its characterizations were fairly accurate.

Altogether, I could only conclude that these scholars affirm language as a constructed, constantly evolving phenomenon, although I still couldn’t see how the ability to influence human actions would equate to an equal ownership of language. It may be old-fashioned, but at present I’m still prepared to embrace Kenneth Burke’s definition of man as “the symbol-using animal.” As far as I know, there’s no evidence that animals can grasp the abstract symbolism inherent in language as well as we can.

However, I do think Gunther Kress’s “Multimodality” afforded me with another avenue for making sense of Reid’s perspective, at least. Kress asserts that “all texts are multimodal”, where ‘text’ seems to be doing a great deal of heavy lifting to encompass practically anything into which meaning can be encoded and decoded. For him, the multimodality of verbal speech arises from its inclusion of “pitch variation; pace; stress; phonological units (produced by a complex of organs); lexis; sequencing (as syntax); etc.” In other words, any element which can have a role in imparting meaning is part of the mode (or means) of linguistic communication. Since some animals can intentionally adapt these facets of communication to a rhetorical context (i.e. cats having a less babyish meow around one another than humans), I can see the argument that many animals possess a kind of language in that way.

But since Kress’s many example pictures and diagrams stress the representational quality of human languages (in which he apparently includes visuals, which he says can develop a kind of grammar) even when it’s completely divorced from written or spoken words, I’m still inclined to say that animals have communicative skills but not language. I’m curious whether anyone knows of any animals capable of abstraction.

Similarly, I wonder at what point we could consider the product of generative AI to be language (or perhaps I should say a form of communication, period). There’s no conscious intent behind it, it’s an actant and not an actor, but it arguably works entirely in abstractions (it doesn’t have meaningful, individual experience of what anything is!) and it certainly considers its modal elements, as many generative AI models will show by displaying alternate response options.

[in-sightjournal]

Ask A Genius 1020: Multimodality and Many Sensory

Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com Rick Rosner: I think Coursera and AI Trends mentioned modalities, and they were using a term we’ve been using for longer, multimodality. They were referencing text, image, YouTube, and other coherent forms of media, but I do not mean that. I am referring to dragging…

[thepostedia]

Rental companies support sustainable multimodality and uniform regulation

Rental companies support sustainable multimodality and uniform regulation

The National Federation of Driverless and Driverless Car Rentals (Feneval) took advantage of its annual meeting with key mobile players, traditionally held before Christmas, to outline its position on recent regulatory developments affecting its sector. The most notable is the definition of mobility as a “social right of all citizens”, which recognizes the text of the sustainable mobility bill…

[werewolf-transgenderism]

I have to say it’s a great time to be teaching composition because tomorrow we will be spending a good chunk of class watching my carefully selected sections of the hbomberguy video

[endreal]

brb, hooking an ai system trained to write scripts to an ai system trained to produce video from textual input and an ai system that generates descriptions of video content as a research exercise in identifying the most prevalent tropes and plot beats in modern cinema by (manually) cross-comparing discrete productions once content has stabilized at statistically significant similarity.

[cbirt]

In an effort to provide a comprehensive solution for protein research, researchers present HelixProtX, a system built around the large multimodal model that facilitates the construction of any-to-any protein modality. It enables the conversion of any input protein modality into any desired protein modality, in contrast to current approaches. 

The experimental results confirm HelixProtX’s superior abilities in performing important tasks, including building protein sequences and structures from textual descriptions and producing functional descriptions from amino acid sequences. 

According to preliminary results, HelixProtX routinely outperforms current state-of-the-art models in terms of accuracy across a variety of protein-related tasks. HelixProtX promises to speed up scientific research by introducing multimodal large models into protein research, creating fresh perspectives on protein biology. 

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[thatonegeekygirl]

i want to believe instead i look at the sky and i feel nothing

little song lyric art piece that i did for school today! words are from Chinese Satellite by Phoebe Bridgers.

[blackberrypicking]

i have to come up with a research topic to cover across multiple assignments for the term help

[eclecticsophism]

any experienced multimodal analysts have any Thoughts on ELAN? i'm on a hunt for a mac-compatible software for annotating vids that allows for a customizable coding scheme. lots of the ones i've seen are for conversation analysis -- which is awesome, but not aligned with my needs

[simplylaurent]

Content of Multimodality

The image attached above is the graphic I created as a multimodal resource. The image displays the eight concepts of rhetoric, serving as a guide into the complexities of writing. Specifically, how multiple variables influence the literary technique of the writer and the receptive perception of the viewer. Created in a well orchestrated diagram, the graphic shows the viewer framework of each concept in relation to another– much displaying how rhetoric isn’t effective if one piece is missing from the “symmetric” image. In course of the definitions, they were added as “mini notes” for the individual concepts of rhetoric for people like me who may be unfamiliar with one or two terms. Being a person who had never really knew what discourse community was, I found the graphic to be helpful in remembering the premise of it through a memorable layout.

[destinyandcoins]

hey remember that time i wrote my final paper for my digital literature and online culture class and chose puppet history as the born-digital text i was going to analyze?

[wewontbesleeping]

told my boss today that i couldn't stay late because i had to take a psychology test tonight (like. for school. for my psychology class) and he thought i meant that i had to go see a psychologist and get tests done ON ME???? what the hell dude

[into-september]

the video to “antihero” literally makes this a zoé song

[turbulentornado]

" witnessing / witnessed " (s.c.)

To have the mother goddess address you is to be seen for your whole self. Your heart/mind is true and strong, and now all can see.

To recognize ones heart/mind, in front of the community, creates an intangible, but strong connection. You have been seen, and now others may see you.