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Multimodal Rhetoric, Digital Writing (DHSI 2025)

Harmut Koenitz's definition of complexity

What these perspectives [on complexity]share is the insight that many phenomena cannot be explained withsimple linear one-to-one mappings of cause and effect—combinatorics, unpredictability and randomness are important factors which also need to be considered.
This understanding is at the heart of research on complexity. Accordingly, Chan (2001) defines complexity as resulting “from the interrelationship, inter-action and inter-connectivity of elements within a system and between a system and its environment” (p. 1). One important factor is also the behaviour of such systems over longer periods of time (Mathews et al., 1999), especially when the focus is on systemic change. In

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Course Pack Reading Excerpts Jody Shipka, Toward a Composition Made Whole

"Concerns were also raised about the way process theory had been applied 'en masse' in classrooms, with some alleging that the process movement had failed to fulfill the goal of empowering students. Instead of underscoring for students multiple ways of knowing and writing, it 'inculcate[d] a particular method of composing'—the idea being that the process taught depended largely on the product teachers expected to receive from students. Also of concern were that 'introspective heuristics' such as free writing and brainstorming led to a 'privatized economy of invention,' suggesting to students that writing began in the writer and not with his or her relationship with the world" (33).

Whitney Trettien, Cut/Copy/Paste

“What these prototypes share is a sense that writing could be something more than a series of words strung into sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and monographs. That is, twentieth-century audiovisual media, interactive interfaces, and technologies like microfilm held out the potential to dethrone the codex form and printed formats, making room for radically new kinds of texts” (Trettien 16-17).

Harmut Koenitz, et al, "Interactive Narrative (IDN)-new way to represent complexity and facilitate digitally empowered citizens"

Indeed, scholars working on complexity have pointed out the need for “new
narratives”. For the topic of history, Turina (2018) suggests that CAS representations present a “continuously changing interaction” which, due to its causality- feedback loop, needs “new narrative tools” (p. 124) that “narrat(e) the past from different points of view” (p. 126). This sentiment echoes Rejeski et al.’s insight that “complexity needs new narratives” (Rejeski et al., 2015). The characteristics of IDN match these requirements, enabling multiple perspectives (including conflicting views), continuous feedback, choices and consequences, emergence, and replay. Put succinctly, IDN offers representations of complex issues combined with a central human form of communication—narrative

An IDN empowers audiences as interactors but also requires them to make choices by picking perspectives and taking decisions. Every traversal of an IDN is a temporary, cognitive reduction of the complexity of the system in the form of a linear, self-directed narrative experience. It his way IDN enables comprehension without enforcing the need for the permanent reduction of presented material that is inherent in many traditional forms of representation such as the journalistic article.

Even a single traversal of an IDN creates an awareness of complexity, due to realisation that alternative paths and/or perspectives exists and have not been visited or explored yet. This is a powerful first step in creating a literacy for complexity through “complexity awareness” by effectively showing that any single narrative can be exhaustive in a complex situation. Furthermore, IDN facilitates replay and allows interactors to revisit their decisions, take a different route and explore a different perspective. Such repeat engagements enable increasing understanding of the complex phenomenon, by building upon the knowledge gained in earlier traversals. (pp. 86-87)

Moulthrop and Salter, Twining

To its critics and advocates, Twine is a tool for resistance and even revolution—for defiance and reimagining the future of genres of media production that were otherwise closed and stagnant.

In the introduction to the pivotal Twine-centered collection Videogames for Humans, merritt k calls Twine the force behind a “quiet revolution”: “Taken up by nontraditional game authors to describe distinctly nontraditional subjects—from struggles with depression, explorations of queer identity, and analyses of the world of modern sex and dating to visions of breeding crustacean horses in a dystopian future—the Twine movement to date has created space for those who have previously been voiceless within games culture to tell their own stories, as well as to invent new visions outside of traditional channels of commerce” (merritt k).