III. Questions
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In this dissertation, I investigate how this process plays out in designing webtext scholarship, or multimodal arguments designed to be engaged in digital environments. How do ideas for a webtext’s design change as a scholar proceeds from start to finish? What are the forces behind concrete structural changes in a webtext’s design across drafts? How do these forces act on a webtext’s design in different ways, especially in ways that influence its implicit argument? And in answering these questions, what can we learn about supporting composers—especially teachers, students, and scholars—as they engage in processes of inventing knowledge in digital environments? Specifically, I frame my central research questions in the following terms:
1. What forces influence invention in designing a webtext, as indicated by change across drafts?
In my next section, I review the sources that inform my approaches to these questions through the lenses of the key terms highlighted in this dissertation’s title: invention, design, and multimodal scholarship. My approach to rhetorical studies of invention is grounded in rhetoric’s close disciplinary ally, composition studies, and in particular, multimodal composing. Thus, I address both the “invention” and “composing” terms of the project’s title in the same section, while recognizing that these are closely intertwined but distinct concepts. Using the title as a framing device serves as one way to somewhat artificially separate out (for the purposes of discussion) what in reality are a set of overlapping concepts as applied throughout the rest of the project. Before diving into webtext invention and composing, however, I begin with a discussion of webtexts as a form of scholarship for readers unfamiliar with the term.
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