The Theories Involved with the Creation of the Portfolio
Working through the process of my portfolio, I had to take into careful consideration everything I learned throughout the semester in this course. As I considered what would be necessary elements to my portfolio, I had to be mindful of particular theories discussed in the critical texts. For one, the criteria given for the project was reminiscent of the Drachten concept which Jonathan Zittrain expounded upon in his text “The Lessons of Wikipedia.” The Drachten example demonstrated the difference between how people react to standards as compared to rules. The example correlates to the criteria given for the portfolio assignment. The criteria, although giving me a general concept of what I needed to do, did not delineate step-by-step instructions. The Wix page is my Drachten, the bare bones of an idea upon which I organized a cogent composition.
The Wix page comes with the burden of space. Since I used a blank template to build my portfolio, I had to keep in mind all the different aspects of space involved. Carolyn Handa, author of Multimedia Rhetoric of the Internet, provides a neat list of the different forms of space involved in creating a website:
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“Physical space: the size and shape of the space occupied by the multimedia project.
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“Perceptual space: Our sense of the scale, distance, or proportion within the multimedia project.
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“Conceptual Space: The way in which the user understands or remembers the design space.
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“Behavioral space: the way in which the user actually moves through the space” (pp. 152).
With each of those bulleted points came a heavy responsibility. I had to be careful to stay attentive to how my portfolio would look on different computer screens and how to make the portfolio the most pleasing to the audience’s eye. Along with that, I had to have my intentions clear as to the navigation of the piece without expressly doling out instructions—because, after all, the visitor is the one who gets to choose how to navigate.
Following along the lines of the process of building web pages, another theory to keep in mind through the creation process was the amount of intertextuality involved. The point of having a portfolio is to showcase the collection of previous undertakings. This implies synthesizing different works together to create a new form—in other words, taking the idea of intertext by the reigns. As James Porter so elegantly put, “the I […] is already itself a plurality of other texts” (pp. 42). To convey the concept of “me” to the audience, I had to display varying examples of my credentials. I also had to consider the audience that the portfolio would be interacting with. This presents a different level of intertext—that of the discourse community involved.
The rhetorical conversation between myself and the varying authors I investigated throughout the semester is revealed from the amount of intertext woven into the portfolio. Not only that, but my audience is more than simply the one I imagine to be viewing the page. This issue is something that I learned from Keith Grant-Davie. The audience invoked is Grant-Davie’s fancy way of labeling the professor grading my portfolio and whomever else I expressly gave the url to. However, there is another audience that I have to consider when making a public forum. “[W]riters cannot be certain who their audiences are,” Grant-Davie explains, “and that rhetors often face "composite" audiences consisting either of several factions or of individuals who each represent several different groups” (214-17). Because of that, I have to be sure to keep my portfolio as transparent as possible. The more explanations I give, the more I am catering to my “audience addressed.” Therefore, I will have completed my objective.