ABSTRACT
Multimodal interactive representations (MIRs) play an important rhetorical role in professional science communication texts and platforms. This chapter first defines multimodality and interactivity, then provides a recent history of MIRs’ development and incorporation into scientific texts. While scientific digitization has roots in the mid-twentieth century, this chapter turns to late twentieth-century and recent twenty-first-century history to summarize how scientific writers and publishers have (or have not) capitalized on digitized textual affordances; this historical section includes an overview of contemporary tools for composing MIRs. The following section examines some rhetorical implications of MIRs, such as what the classical canons of Western rhetoric highlight about them as well as how MIRs fit into and expand extant taxonomies of scientific visualization. This latter section is bolstered by example MIRs drawn from two distinct sources: a database entry from the chemistry database Reaxys and an interactive map made available online by the Kentucky Geological Survey. The chapter concludes with recommendations for future research on MIRs.
