The Intermediality of Field Guides: Notes Towards a Theory

Abstract

In field guides the mediating practices used are called media combinations (see Lars Elleström and Irina Rajewsky, this volume), that is, a multifaceted medium which contains two or more kinds of media modes organized and combined in such a way as to create a certain perceptive and cognitive effect. It is therefore not of any major relevance in this context to speak of border crossings, due to the fact that the genre makes use of the differences and delimitations of the media contained in it, rather than transgressing or dissolving them. The media transgressions made while using a field guide nevertheless seem mainly to be a side effect of our way of perceiving the media modes it contains. Our attention wanders from the object we would like to identify to image, text, maps and out to the environment surrounding us, and eventually back to the physical object we are trying to identify, in a process that at least superficially seems to be related to the cognitive activity triggered when decoding a page containing both text and image.¹