IV. Webtexts

I use “webtexts” to mean scholarly essays designed to present their arguments in a way that incorporates the affordances of an online environment. There’s no single standard definition, but generally, though, webtexts are peer-reviewed, interactive scholarly essays in which web design plays a deliberately crafted role in presenting the argument.

Examples of online venues publishing this kind of work include Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; Computers and Composition Online; and Computers and Composition Digital Press. Webtexts are still primarily in the genre of peer-reviewed scholarly essay or article or book in terms of their intellectual weight, even if they depart from these more traditional forms of knowledge presentation. This is one of the reasons I think webtexts are so interesting to examine when thinking about questions of invention and knowledge creation. They push on the boundaries of professional scholarly communication forms while still maintaining a claim to equal intellectual weight and value through the act of making.

Furthermore, there are many process reflections built into individual webtext projects but fewer studies comparing digital invention processes across webtext projects, which is where I’m setting up this project to go (towards a larger comparative ethnography of webtext design practices). On a more anecdotal level, I’ve met many scholars and colleagues who value digital composing and are interested in or value webtexts. However, some have no idea how to even start designing such a project, what it looks like to carry one out, or how to evaluate the final argument. This project serves as one attempt to make the webtext invention and knowledge-creation process more transparent and accessible, through showing what it looks like and feels like for one composer to develop this design work in a lived context.

Although hyptertext scholarship has existed for decades, webtexts as a scholarly form were established in the field of digital rhetoric and composition with the birth of Kairos Journal in 1996. “Webtexts” have remained largely a product of digital composing studies and its disciplinary allies; however, their full span is challenging to trace because they have gone under multiple names and terms, and there is little cross-disciplinary centralized coordination for doing, discussing, or developing this kind of work.

For the purposes of this project, I situate webtexts within broader work on multimodal scholarship and seek to show their similarities and distinctions—to clarify what are the particular stakes of webtext composing without claiming that this invention model necessarily extends to all forms of multimodal scholarship, or even to all webtexts. I focus especially on humanities scholarship in this project; addressing digital composing and scientific scholarship is the work of another project.

There has been a range of work explored at the intersections of fields known as the digital humanities, an association of multiple diciplines united by a focus on bringing digital tools to bear on humanities knowledge-making practices, often with an emphasis on making or production (Drucker; Gold; Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson; Underberg and Zorn). These projects often take the form of archives, data visualizations, performance projects, games, or other creative representations of humanities knowledge. Additionally, digital tools can be implemented at the analysis level to examine and engage humanities data without necessarily being incorporated into the final representation as a professional work of knowledge communication. Furthermore, outside academic communication, there is considerable work done in other public institutions such as theaters and museums to make creative or specialized knowledge accessible to a public audience.

Webtexts fit within this broader swath of digital humanities scholarship but are, I suggest, something distinct from archives, data visualizations, or performative projects (even insofar as they overlap or incorporate these elements). Webtexts blur the lines between traditional and multimodal scholarship in interesting and productively dangerous ways. They raise new questions on how is scholarly knowledge created and what “counts” as scholarship in challenging, potentially risky ways. They perform design-as-argument in the context of what looks in many ways like an academic article, pushing on boundaries of knowledge-creation within traditional scholarly forms in ways distinct from other kinds that can be more easily dismissed as “something else.” I suggest there is much fertile ground here for examining scholarly knowledge-making and invention practices more broadly, not in contrasting “traditional” and “innovative” forms of scholarship but rather in looking closely at what happens when they overlap, mutate, and become something that is not quite either.

Much of the work on webtexts as a form of scholarship has existed in the context of multimodal online journals devoted to publishing that kind of scholarship, especially from an editors’ standpoint. Composers’ side perspectives have largely been grounded in individual experiences and reflections, rather than providing a synthesized cross-composer mapping of the invention strategies of a total community of practice. This project bears these distinctions as well, in organizing case studies based on journals and immersing the data in autoethnographic experience. However, the data gathered autoethnographically provided codes for analyzing invention practices and influences across composers, and gives a basis for future studies with a much more extensive participant base.

Specifically, I investigate webtext invention processes using autoethnography, which I address in greater detail in Chapter 2. Although there has been work on digital ethnography (Underberg and Zorn) and on autoethnography (Ellis, de la Garza, Lawless), there has been less work on “digital autoethnography” as a research method for investigating digital composing practices. One of the few uses I’ve found of the term thus far is for a pedagogical context, where it receives brief attention as a pedagogical tool for helping students “consider how interface and infrastructure can shape the content and construction of their digital selves” (Uszkalo and Harkness 37) rather than extended theorization or performance. Demonstrating a rigorous method for conducting a “digital autoethnography” of webtext composing could help provide tools for reflecting on material scholarly practice and how it informs knowledge creation (Adams and Thompson, Burgess and Hamming, Siddiqui). The process of organizing these large amounts of self-generated data could also provide models for information management, which Whittemore characterizes as “[o]ne of the key challenges of contemporary knowledge work” (1). Additionally, working autoethnographically has allowed me to generate a significant amount of contextualized, IRB-approved human research data in a relatively short amount of time (Uotinen) by creating and capturing digital assets such as screenshots, video of in-progress composing, and reflections. I hope that my project will be a contribution to these methodological conversations as well as to discussions of webtexts and scholarly professional composing practices.

To theorize and apply this approach to invention, I look at three webtext case studies collected over ten months (May 2016-February 2017). I collected drafts from each composing session, as well as contextual data to examine forces acting on changes in drafts (such as video recordings, screen recordings, and reflection notes). I look at forces acting on webtext invention through three dimensions of human experience: social, material, cognitive (Buehl), which are reflected on my chapter breakdown into analytical sections on people, tools, and metaphors.

This project is largely situated in a single composer’s experience. Individual narrative accounts of composers’ invention process experiences are already emically important to the webtext composing community. For example, Kairos's Inventio section makes invention narratives available as resources for both theory and practice, and webtext scholarship tends to be very reflective in identifying how its design contributes to its argument or was otherwise developed—which makes sense, perhaps, for a digital composing practice situated in a discipline that studies digital composing practices.The benefit is of intense depth rather than breadth, and the ability to look back at influences on shifts in drafts in closely, thoroughly documented detail. To provide checks and balances for individual experience, though, I do look at other composers’ invention narratives experiences, gathered via interviews and Kairos’s Inventio section. In future research, I will continue to collect more invention data closer to the moment of composition (Takayoshi). For now, though, I focus on my own drafts in depth, with some examination of other composers’ experiences working on similar projects.