The Third Eye:
An Exhibit of Literacy Narratives from Nepal

Cardinal Directions:
Understanding Multimodal Stories as Multidimensional Texts

All about us, there are unmistakable signs that what counts as a text and what constitutes reading and writing are changing—indeed, have already changed and radically so—in this age of digitally afforded multimodality. To rehearse the obvious, it is possible now to easily integrate words with images, sound, music, and movement to create digital artifacts that do not necessarily privilege linguistic forms of signification but rather that draw on a variety of modalities . . . to create different forms of meaning.(224-225)
- Glenda Hull and Michael Nelson, "Locating the Semiotic Power of Multimodality" (2005)

The icon of the Buddha's eyes is painted or carved on all four sides of the rectangular structure built upon the steeple of the stupa. The popular understanding of the symbol’s presence on all four cardinal directions is that divine wisdom is omniscience: spiritual insight leads us to seeing all faces and dimensions of truth. I refer to the symbolism of the third eye once again to suggest that when we see the image, hear the voice, and listen to the words of a storyteller, we see more than one dimension of the story. Multimodal narratives embody the narrator and his or her words, voice, appearance, gestures, and so on simultaneously. Multimodal texts are multidimensional.

In this section, I will discuss the complexity and richness of meaning in multimodal artifacts which simultaneously offer opportunities and challenges for scholars and researchers in their attempt to study the artifacts. Compared to the experience of working with print-based scholarly material, such experience of working with multimodal artifacts is different and challenging in many and significant ways. In particular, in spite of the tremendous increase in the availability of new technologies and access to the internet,* digital scholarship has not yet become viable or popular in the Nepalese academia. As a result, in my attempt to study and present digital literacy narratives from Nepal, I had to begin providing support to scholars (research note 7), as well as soliciting contributions from them, in order to help them create the artifacts, rather than by looking for and selecting what would suit my research and scholarly purposes.

Similarly, because multimodal materials capture people’s ideas and emotions in all their dimensions—verbal as well as non-verbal languages, voice and accent, the expression of emotion by the enunciation of words, images of the body and the surrounding, and so on—they can be richer in meaning and rhetorically more effective in some ways. But these very features can become more of a disadvantage to those who speak in a foreign language, attempt to engage in an unfamiliar discourse, and use media that they are not accustomed to. Thus, factors like genre, medium, and bodily presence in the text probably influenced most of the narrators’ comfort levels in one way or another.

The participants were not able to revise and edit their work before they published to the archive. The knowledge of this fact intensified technical, ethical, and cultural differences and challenges on my part as the researcher. As speakers of English as a foreign language, the contributors are used to revising, reorganizing, editing, and proofreading their print-based compositions before publishing them; they seemed to miss the opportunity to refine their multimodal narratives more intensely than their native English speaking counterparts.

Thus, as viewers and researchers of such narratives, we should note that for individuals to whom the genre, medium and even language are not their daily cup of tea, the difficulty of refining multimodal artifacts could make the production and publication of such work additionally challenging. It is certainly possible, at least for the tech-savvy, to edit the material, but as I indicated above, the fact that media like video capture a whole host of linguistic and semiotic materials increases the differences and hence the level of discomfort for the average scholar.

Certainly, some of the above challenges that I faced are also applicable to researchers who use participants’ ideas and words in alphabetic text. In an assessment of articles published in CCC between 1993 and 1995, Anderson (1998) found that one out of five articles involved formally designed quantitative or qualitative studies, and in 22 out of a total of 71 articles the researchers “quote[d] someone else’s unpublished writing, quote or paraphrase spoken words, or otherwise incorporate ‘data’ they obtained through interaction with other individuals” (p. 64). It is in the context of conventional research that Anderson warns scholars to be aware of ethical issues that arise “when our person-based studies involve faculty colleagues, university administrators, or members of the many other groups studied in composition research” (ibid.). In the case of this research, the challenges were intensified by the issues that I describe above: in short, the multimodality of the data and the impossibility of keeping the participants anonymous, the unfamiliarity of the genre of literacy narrative to the participants, and the cultural difference between the research participants and my primary audience.

Those challenges, however, led me towards an increasingly open mindset and more flexible approaches. For example, I began with the urge to find patterns among the narratives and to compare or contrast the stories with similar stories from other societies, but the fact that each story presented a world of its own made it impossible for me to make any generalizations. I could look at each story from a different perspective and notice different nuances of meaning, but at the same time, like the sign under Buddha’s third eye, each story only presented a narrative framework that held the author’s ideas and experiences together in one organic whole. I hope that the following analyses of the stories will help you see how these multimodal texts not only convey the intellectual ideas through the words of the narrators but also bring the stories to life through the images and voices of the narrators, their gestures and body language, and their personalities as reflected through all these semiotic materials.

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* For instance, the number of internet subscribers in Nepal increased from 30 thousand in 2003 to 945 thousand in 2010; a connection is assumed to be used by an average of five users. ↩