Design and Layout in Illustrated Documents: Towards a Model of Genre Judy Delin University of Stirling John Bateman University of Bremen Patrick Allen University of Bradford

Overview Background to the project What is document genre? Rhetorical structure in document design Some worked examples of genre description Conclusions and directions

Background to the Project GeM: Genre and Multimodality Genre model of illustrated document types Close work with designers and layout professionals Practical constraints on design tasks Aimed at generating and transforming sample layouts by computer

Levels of Description: Waller (1987) Topic structure‘typographic effects whose purpose is to display information about the author’s argument – the purpose of the discourse’ Artefact structure‘those features of a typographic display that result from the physical nature of the document or display and its production technology’ Access structure‘those features that serve to make the document usable by readers and the status of its components clear’

Levels of Description: Bateman et al Content Structurethe structure of the information to be communicated Rhetorical Structurethe rhetorical relationships between content elements, the ‘argument’ Navigation Structurethe ways in which the intended mode(s) of consumption of the document is/are supported Layout Structurethe nature, appearance and position of elements on the page

Genre is constituted in... The necessity to satisfy goals at these levels, and to address constraints: Canvas constraintsarising out of the physical nature of the object Production constraintsarising out of the production technology Consumption constraintsarising out of the way in which the object is mediated/consumed

Rhetorical Structure in Document Design How the content is argued and presented: Statement:evidence Category: example Action: purpose List element: list element Documents should be structured to preserve and signpost these relationships (see e.g. Schriver 1997)

The notion of genre Every text both reflects and constructs its genre Genre boundaries erode and move; genres colonize one another; expectations change Description of genre ‘space’ that allows all to be related as a set of parameters of variation Generating examples out of the ‘space’ allows creation of novel text designs as well as production of existing genre examples

Rhetorical Structure in Document Design nucleus satellite multinuclear Rhetorical structure theory (Mann and Thompson 1987)

Summary Rhetorical structure is important, but can be subverted by practical issues Practical constraints must therefore be part of the description of genre Practical constraints differ between genres Close work with designers, as well as document consumers, must be part of academic research