I’ve been thinking about multiliteracy.

I first started thinking about IT Literacy but developed my thinking broader than that – involving all the interrelated aspects.

Take word clouds for example.  They are commonly used on the Internet both to display tags, or prominent words from a site.  Here’s one on “Academics” from Wordle.net (Click to open and view larger)

To understand this word cloud there are multiple levels of understanding required.  Some of the elements of this image have semantic meaning and other elements have only visual meaning. 

Do the words have an order or a position on the page that is important?  No.

Usually words are arranged on a page – like this one – in an order suitable for forming sentences.  In the example given above, the words are a kind of list – but not.  In “web speak” this collection of words is called a cloud.  Some users seem to intrinsically know that the words should be read individually but for others it’s a concept that needs to be explained.

Are the spaces between the words important? No.

Words can sometimes be arranged artistically so that the dark or white space forms a kind of image.  Sometimes in this setting the actual words have no meaning at all, other than as a form of media with which to “paint” or “create”.  Take this example here:

In this case, it is the pattern that is important.  The words simply fill the space – but the size and orientation of the words does not matter.  The shape could provide an alternative meaning.  For example:

seems to be an oxymoron.  What is really being said here -

• I love to hate you?
• I hate to love you?
• I pretend to love you but inside my secret is that I hate you?
• You may think that I hate you, but really I love you?

A certain kind of shape/text pattern congruence/incongruence literacy must exist to explore these deeper questions.

Returning to the first example of the tag cloud there are other questions too:

Are the colours of the words important? No.

The colours could be used to define multiple categories – so all words of the same colour belong somehow together.  In this case they are not, but spurious understanding could develop from attaching meaning to the colours that was not intended by the creator.  Visually though the colours are important, in that they negate the need for so much white space as contrasting words are easier to pick out and read.

Are the size of the words important? Yes!

Literate readers must negate colour, placement, order and pattern in the example - but should understand that size is important.  In this case, the size of the words on the page indicates the popularity of that word or phrase.  The more often a word appears in a page or site, then the larger it appears in the tag or word cloud.  It may indicate that the word is important – but it may also indicate that it’s often used.

Other meanings:

In order to be fully literate, a reader should understand that the word cloud is a representation of underlying data.  When viewing the above image, it might need to be explained to users that the image was not created by typing words into an image programme, but that a long list of words, or a blog, or wiki or website was fed into a programme and that the most repeated words were visually represented in the cloud.  Sometimes the words also appear sideways and upside-down.  Likewise, there is no semantic meaning to the orientation of words, other than for visual interest.

I’m sure there are other aspects of this word cloud that might be interpreted in ways that I haven’t considered – please comment me to add your thoughts.

Taking this into account – do we need a wider view of IT Literacy to include “multiliteracy”??

By the way, if you have an interest in discovering and illustrating patterns in data, then Neoformix is an excellent site! Take a look and see whether you can intrinsically understand the semantics of the graphs, or whether some of your multiliteracy needs developing.