Remediation refers to presenting one medium in another medium, e.g., an online gallery of a museum’s art works, or a digital text that incorporates background music. According to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in Remediation: Understanding New Media, remediation is a defining characteristic of digital media.[1] To acquire cultural significance, new media may revise, repurpose, remix, reference, and/or compete with older media.
Remix, one of the tools used most often in remediation, refers to altering a work from its original state by adding, removing, and/or changing pieces of the item.
Remediation
There are three basic types of remediation:
- Sstraightforward representation
- Enhancement
- Transformation
Straightforward Representation
Older media can be represented in digital form directly, as exemplified by The Collection Online from the Guggenheim Museum. The Guggenheim’s website presents images of artworks from various artists and time periods, so that viewers can experience them directly and virtually, through digital media.
With this type of remediation, transparency is key: “The digital medium wants to erase itself, so that the viewer stands in the same relationship to the content as she would if she were confronting the original medium.” [2] Remediation in this case enables media to be shared with a larger audience and viewed apart from the limitations of place and time that exist in the real world.
Enhancement
Remediation may pay homage to older media but also work to enhance or improve upon them. For example, “Snow Fall” by John Branch, is a multimedia text that uses graphic, video, and interactive elements to compose a feature news article. Published by the New York Times in 2012, “Snow Fall” highlights the potential of digital composing environments and tools to make stories come alive. Here’s what Branch said about “Snow Fall” in an interview for the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative:
Snow Fall worked because of the multimedia . . . in a lot of ways. Graphic elements ‘show you what the mountain looked like, show you the heart-wrenching interviews of the survivors.’ That is, ‘Everything in the story helped the reader understand the story better.’
Transformation
Remediation may also “try to refashion the older medium or media entirely, while still marking the presence of the older media and therefore maintaining a sense of multiplicity or hypermediacy.” [2]
Pinterest presents a good example in terms of remediating cookbooks and cooking magazines. Recipes (or links to recipes) are remediated into pins that feature visually stunning food photography. Site users can then like, share, comment on, or save these pins to return to later.
Remix
Remix involves changing, blending, adding to, or taking away from existing media to create something new. Often remix is associated with music, as in the process of taking a radio song and remixing it for a nightclub, or remixing a country song for a pop music radio station. But any media can be remixed, from photography to text to film. With writing, one notable example of remix is the cut-up technique, which involves actually cutting up a text and rearranging the cut pieces to form a new text.
Attribution
Attribution means giving credit to creators in accordance with copyright law. When you remediate or remix, you need to acknowledge who was responsible for creating the original work(s).
Attribution may sometimes be complicated, as different works have different licenses and thus require different forms of attribution. On one end of the spectrum, works might not require any attribution, as they are part of the Public Domain. On the other end of the spectrum, works may require special permission from the copyright holder to be used.
In the middle, there are works with Creative Commons licenses, works that were created with the intention of being reused in some way. Creative Commons licenses allow you to use works as long as you comply with the terms of the license.
Fair Use in Multimodal Projects
The fair use doctrine allows students to use portions of copyrighted words and materials for educational purposes. The CCUMC (Consortium of College and University Media Centers) created fair use guidelines specifically for multimodal projects. These guidelines can help you determine the portion of copyrighted material that can be used in your multimodal projects.
Limitations When Remixing Copyrighted Work
| Type | Rule | Example |
| Motion Media (t.v., films, videos, etc.) | Up to 10% or 3 minutes, whichever is less, of a copyrighted work | Using 3 minutes from your favorite episode of Friends in a video for class |
| Text Material | Up to 10% or 1000 words, whichever is less, of a copyrighted work | Using 50 words from an article |
| Music lyrics and music videos | Up to 10%, but in no event more than 30 seconds, of the music and lyrics from an individual musical work. Any alterations to a musical work shall not change the basic melody or the fundamental character of the work. | Using up to 30 seconds of Childish Gambino’s This is America music video in a video you make for class |
| Illustrations and photographs | No more than 5 images by an individual artist or photographer from a published collective work not more than 10% or 15 images | When writing an analysis of a photo essay, you cannot use more than 5 photos by the photographer. |
| Numerical data sets | Up to 10% or 2500 fields or cell entries, whichever is less, from a copyrighted database or data table |
The Importance of Attribution
Failure to get attribution right in a multimodal text can have serious consequences. In an academic context, failing to give proper attribution can result in questions of plagiarism or academic dishonesty. In other contexts, there can be legal consequences to using others’ works without complying with fair use and/or attributing correctly. So, make sure that you carefully attribute all works of others appropriately.
[1] Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999.
[2] Ibid.
