ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on written text as visual artifact. It talks about the concept of writer to include such terms as composer and designer and explores the implications of this renaming for writing practice. The writing system is an example of a semiotic system. Modes are ways of categorizing different semiotic resources that have the potential for cultural systematization into codes. The chapter describes the examples of teachers exploiting the affordances of digital technology to produce multimodal texts and hypertexts, but also confirms that the visual has always been with us. The digital is not the same as the multimodal. However, the Digital Revolution has expanded opportunities for us to engage in multimodal text production. Digitization is the process of converting information into digital format, which involves measuring the original event at frequent intervals and storing as a string of digitally encoded number. The most far-reaching aspect of the Digital Revolution has been the invention of hypertext markup language (HTML).
