VIII. Goals
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Table 3 summarizes the main goals of this project. I articulate my general goals, then identify their potential applications in professional and pedagogical digital composing contexts.
Table 3: Goals of the Project
| General Goals | Professional Goals | Pedagogical Goals | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Digital Composing | Demystify processes behind creating multimodal scholarship | Encourage scholars to practice multimodal scholarship | Encourage instructors to develop assignments requiring multimodal arguments |
| Rhetorical Invention | Investigate distributed invention processes behind a webtext’s “design-as-argument” | Challenge traditional invention models through intensive process documentation | Invite students to critically consider influences on their digital design processes |
| Qualitative Analysis | Develop multimodal approaches for analyzing and representing multimodal data | Challenge exclusively linguistic approaches to qualitative data analysis | Provide students with a set of codes for analyizing changes across their digital documents |
Overall, this project accounts for one composer's approach to negotiating with material influences in developing a webtext's design across drafts. Despite their interest, colleagues have mentioned that they are not sure how to create webtexts, or even how to get started--an issue as present in 2018 as it was for Ball in 2004 (407). This is a time- and resource-intensive process that can be new, intimidating, and risky, particularly as it is being designed for a professional scholarly audience but can also compete with the demands of other projects which may be more institutionally valued (Ball 409, Purdy and Walker). To make this kind of composing more accessible and approachable, if this is a form of composing worth developing that is worth institutional resources and that we want to flourish, we need to open up experiences of webtext invention so people can see and imagine what it looks like, know how to plan for it, know how to support it, and know how to value it.
More broadly, beyond webtexts and multimodal scholarship, I suggest that focusing on invention experiences, especially situated amidst negotiation of multiple material forces, challenges traditional conceptions of inventor as “lonely writer in the garret” and makes scholarly knowledge more transparent (and thus more accessible). Focusing on invention experiences also has implications for teaching invention, by showing students habits of mind and practice that teach them how to learn, to problem-solve, and to negotiate with these forces in their own work, rather than teaching them what to learn—as a way of learning by modeling, and entering with students into the vulnerability of the distributed composing moment.
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