Welcome to Issue 7.1 of Xchanges!
Welcome to Issue 7.1 of Xchanges! In this issue, we feature four texts by undergraduate-student scholars from University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cedarville University, Keene State College, and New Mexico Tech. These texts reveal an array of research strategies and presentation approaches. For presentation in a digital context, authors were able to offer significant visual data (images, tables, screenshots) to support their analyses of their primary research material. The innovative texts by these undergraduate scholars reveal the ways in which users of information (information that comes in multiple forms) are included or excluded, challenged or appeased, as a result of the "textual" form. The articles in this issue take up this broad theme in eye-opening ways.
In "Common Elements of Effective Screencasts," Joseph Friedman, of New Mexico Tech, examines effective strategies employed in screencasts. He assesses various screencasting tactics in the interest of devising an instructive scheme for effective design in this communication modality. As screencasting is becoming increasingly common, especially in the domain of digital "how-to's," Friedman's distillation of the "common elements" that emerge in usable screencasts is timely.
In "Comic Books: An Evolving Multimodal Literacy," Taylor Quimby, of Keene State College, takes as his research catalyst the elemental question of “how we read comic books.” He is interested in investigating readers’ relationships to comic form and content, especially in light of comics’ long-standing reputation, among critics, as a “sub-literate medium.” Comics, Quimby argues, are essentially multimodal and thus require examiners of the form to be sensitive to the necessary “fluidity” of the medium and its multiple, simultaneous valences of “literacy.
In "The Relationship between Editors and Authors: A Lit Review," Cedarville University's Kelly Shackelford examines the relationship between authors and editors, generally in the domain of business. She offers insight into the stereotype of the "antagonistic” relationship between these two parties and she examines the multiple communication reasons for challenges that often exist. Following a literature review, Shackelford synthesizes common sources of conflict between authors and editors and offers, in conclusion, guidelines that authors and editors both can employ to improve and enhance this necessary relationship for the benefit of the ultimate textual product.
In "Health Information Accessibility and Availability and Its Impact on the Health Literacy of Hispanics," Jennifer Stone, of University of Wisconsin, Madison, carefully presents a research study of health-information materials available to Spanish-speakers in pharmacies, drug stores, and health centers in a Midwestern city. Her study is revelatory of problems that exist in communities throughout the nation, problems concerning access to information, existence of resources for the production of non-English-language health materials, and the awareness of those in the health-information field of the significant disparity in availability between English-language materials and Spanish-language materials in communities with considerable Spanish-speaking populations.
These four scholarly projects cover a range of subjects but together speak to the various ways in which “users” of information receive information today, via screencasts, via native-language documents or websites, in the form a directive from an editor, or in the image-and-text fusion of a comic book. We hope you will enjoy reading, viewing, and interacting with these fine scholarly works from this issue’s group of young scholars!