II. Overview

My dissertation project investigates the relationship between material influences, invention, and design in making webtexts. Using digital autoethnography, discourse-based interviews, and composing case studies, I map out moments of invention in webtext projects’ designs (with attention to visual, linguistic, spatial, and audio channels), noting these moments’ correspondence with particular invention influences (in terms of people, tools, and metaphors). This detailed mapping contributes to conversations on the materially situated nature of knowledge creation by foregrounding the role otherwise invisible technologies and designs play in shaping which arguments are possible to make.

Broadly, this project seeks to join a growing body of work on the materiality of scholarly writing practices, which may or may not be digital (Arola and Wysocki; Bammer and Joeres; Prins; Obenzinger). Burgess and Hamming theorize the importance of investigating the material conditions of production behind scholarly multimedia as a challenge to perceptions of scholarly work as purely intellectual, and suggest that “that we should also rethink our own identity as scholars and intellectuals, in particular the ways in which our scholarly activities are bound up at a very deep level with the technologies we use to practice our craft” (31). Likewise, they note that “[t]he multimedia scholar, by taking seriously the materiality of knowledge production, embodies an intellectual identity that is dispersed over material, rhetorical, and technical networks — a crucial transformation that must be acknowledged when assessing ‘what counts’ as scholarly activity in the academy” (34). Siddiqui also calls for further research into the “material ecosystem surrounding digital scholarship” (41). However, both studies remain almost solely at the level of theory and textual analysis, rather than engagement with actual composing practices and contexts; furthermore, even in the act of discussing the importance and value of scholarly multimedia composing, all of these texts remain formatted as alphabetic essays published online (apart from a single image as illustrative figure in Burgess and Hamming’s piece).

Additionally, this project seeks to take up Delagrange et al.’s call for building critical conversations around webtext composing through juxtaposed perspectives and participatory digital practice (“Opening an Invitation to Remix”). This call (extended in webtext form) presents interviews with ten Kairos “Best Webtext” winners conducted by their fellow awardees, describing their project’s development and contextualizing the significance of their work in the field’s history. The authors then invite readers to remix the interviews and submit them for inclusion in the published webtext project. This dissertation project serves as my own multi-channel response to these ongoing conversations around scholarly multimedia in general and webtexts in particular. My dissertation seeks to build off the foundations laid by scholars such as Delagrange et al., Burgess and Hamming, and Siddiqui by foregrounding how the material conditions involved in the composing of webtexts (as examples of new media scholarship) impact their value as knowledge-making, knowledge-performing modes.

In “Show Not Tell” (2004), Ball identifies “new media scholarship” as “fairly new” and apologizes that her print essay does not enact the convention for which she’s advocating in the hopes of making her argument for the value of webtexts more broadly accessible. More than ten years later, as the “newness” of “new media” has worn off somewhat, the value and intellectual rigor of webtexts as acceptable forms of scholarly composing has become increasingly established, if still contested (Ball, Purdy and Walker). Risks remain and the stakes are high (as with any form of scholarly composing), but a body of work exists to support the value of multimodal scholarship and to how to read/evaluate it. I suggest that the time is right for the next step—investigating more rigorously how this kind of composing is concretely enacted.