III. Backgrounds
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In my next chapter I will focus on an in-depth analysis of my composing activities and processes; here, however, I briefly overview the contours (Prior and Shipka) of the activities behind these projects. My data collection for webtext composing work focuses on three main (currently in-progress) webtext projects: “Dancing Across Media” (an essay submitted to Kairos with Kaustavi Sarkar); “The Magpie’s Nest” (a review essay in Computers and Composition Online); and “Religion, Remediated” (a book chapter in a collection edited by Michael Harker, Ben McCorkle, and Kate Comer proposed for CCDP). This broad overview provides a foundation for the next section’s examination of the key changes in inscape--the differences through which the projects’ components were pulled, tweaked, and reassembled--and the corresponding forces to which these changes respond on a more minute scale.
Dancing Across Media: Composing the Odissi Body
Project Description
“Dancing Across Media” is a webtext article completed in collaboration with Kaustavi Sarkar, a doctoral student in the dance department at Ohio State and a classical Indian dancer. She recorded a short dance sequence using motion-capture technology, then used the movement data to generate four videos with different avatars (two of which were created in collaboration with professional animators). The webtext article presents the four videos, connects them to relevant discussions in digital and culturally contextualized composing, and analyzes the impact of each avatar form on the Odissi movement data. The webtext was coded from a blank template with HTML and CSS in Aptana Studio; all photo and video elements come from Kaustavi’s research and travel media files.
Project Context
I met Kaustavi Sarkar as her panel discussant at the Student Folklore Association Conference in April 2016. I was intrigued by her work and thought that it might be a strong project for a webtext, so as to include her digital files in the essay itself. I was just finishing the webtext design for Love and Helmbrecht’s “Rhetoric of Amazon Reviews” piece at the time and wanted to continue in a similar line of projects creatively adapting culturally situated knowledge for digital spaces (Getto et al., Zorn and Underberg, Christen). Kaustavi was interested in collaborating as well; she had been collaborating with a professional animator for several months already, and her advisor had recommended she find someone from the English department to work with her from a digital media perspective.
Key Changes in Inscape
The project as a whole went through several changes in organization at micro and macro levels. As noted above, we had initially planned to do a single collaborative essay in webtext form; however, as the project progressed, we ultimately submitted two projects--an alphabetic essay to Choreographic Practices and a webtext performative/reflective essay to Kairos. The two essays were organized such that the essay reflected Kaustavi’s central concerns and questions on the project, and the webtext mine. Considering the webtext alone, the major reorganizing work came at the first stage of figuring out how to design the splash page; though the central visual motif on the homepage remained consistent, the ways in which the videos were incorporated onto the home page changed significantly between the mockup and the first iteration. The internal pages changed significantly as well as the relationship between the video and the analysis text shifted in prominence. Finally, there were tweaks to media elements along the way as more pieces became available, and we worked to bring the webtext together as an integrated whole. Overall, the shifts in inscape in this particular webtext reflect the impact of professional pressures, dialogue between two collaborators, culturally situated data (to which one collaborator is a cultural insider and the other is not), and technical difficulties in implementing the originally drafted design.
Religion, Remediated: A Multiliteracies Approach to Vernacular Religious Literacy with the DALN
Project Description
“Religion, Remediated” is a book chapter in the collection The Archive as Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches to the DALN, edited by Michael Harker, Kate Comer, and Ben McCorkle. The chapter offers an approach to addressing religious dimensions of literacy in classroom contexts through remediating religiously inflected literacy narratives from the DALN to emphasize a personal, vernacular approach to religious literacy without requiring disclosure from class members. The essay was composed in Word; the four case study examples were composed in iMovie, Word, Illustrator, and Audacity. At the time of writing, the final web interface has not yet been determined.
Project Context
I first heard about this collection while working with Michael Harker and Kate Comer, two of the editors, as a volunteer soliciting literacy narratives at an academic conference in March 2015. I was reading for candidacy exams at the time I saw the reminder emails from the third editor, Ben McCorkel, before the proposals were due in the middle of September 2015. The opportunity to propose a chapter struck me as a chance to pull together ideas about stories, remediation, and religion in classroom settings that I was trying to synthesize in the midst of my readings.
Key Changes in Inscape
This project as a whole went through significant changes in organization. Despite similar content, the first, middle, and final drafts bear only a few sentences in common. There was greater consistency for the four case study media elements: a video, an image, an audio file, and a poem. These pieces were drafted early on in the process and remained largely the same in overall structure (except for the audio file, which underwent significant changes). The first rough draft of the essay was produced as a freewrite with a largely coherent story grounded in my teaching experiences. The first submitted draft retained some connection to the first rough draft based on anecdotal evidence but was extremely theory-heavy and relied primarily on secondary sources for evidence. The final draft, produced after feedback and conversation with the editors, placed the spotlight on the four case study narratives and largely erased any claims based on teaching experiences. There were also significant changes to the structure of the assignment being theorized, and even as to which case studies were included in the draft as a whole. Overall, this webtext’s change in inscape reflects feedback from editors, questions on intellectual property, technical difficulties, and a negotiation of priority over whose voice and story are foregrounded.
The Magpie’s Nest: A Webtext Review of Webtext Scholarship
Project Description
“The Magpie’s Nest” is a review essay exploring the possibilities of webtext form for reviewing webtext scholarship. It is a companion piece to a print essay reviewing the same three focal webtexts and deliberately takes a more experimental approach than its alphabetic counterpart. The webtext uses the metaphor of a magpie as thief and collector of shiny objects to perform a critical reading through sampling and arranging media elements from the three reviewed projects. The project consists of a mix of sampled image, video, and alphabetic files. I then arranged these files on illustrated backgrounds created in Affinity Designer. All elements were coded into a blank template with HTML and CSS in Aptana Studio.
Project Context
Kris Blair sent an invitation to review Sustainable Learning Spaces (CCDP) to the OSU English grad student listserv in the middle of November, right before the weekend of my written candidacy exams. I had done a review of a CCDP project for Computers and Composition before, at the immediate beginning of my graduate career at OSU, and responded right away that I was interested. Kris asked whether I wanted to do a print or online review; I was in the English department digital media center at the time and went down the hall to Cindy’s office to ask her thoughts. She suggested that I do both print and online versions, then a reflection comparing the difference affordances of each form for reviewing webtext scholarship. I proposed this idea to Kris, who agreed and said that a print review would be needed by October 1st, with a web version due sometime shortly after (on a slightly more flexible schedule) so that all the pieces could be released at the same time. In April 2016, during an advising meeting, Cindy recommended I expand the project to a review essay of the three most recent CCDP webtext projects; I proposed this idea to Kris via email as well shortly before she came to OSU for DMAC, and she agreed. The planned project had thus expanded from a single review of a recent webtext (as requested by Kris) to a review essay of three recent webtexts in both print and online forms (as suggested by Cindy, proposed by me, and confirmed by Kris).
Key Changes in Inscape
This project underwent changes in organization on both the macro and the micro levels. As noted above, the scope and nature of the review essay changed fairly significantly through conversation with Cindy and Kris before actual composing of the piece even began. In terms of the webtext itself, due to the compressed time period, the project went through several brainstorming sessions with consistent imagery, but I introduced a significantly different central metaphor just as intensive production was beginning. This metaphor attempted to act as a unifying force to integrate the many separate pieces into a whole, but it also introduced its own challenges as a sense-making device that added layers of complication and self-awareness that were challenging to fully explain in such a brief project. Thus, the reflection became combined with the webtext, rather than a separate piece reflecting on the overall process of creating a webtext vs. print review. There were also some minor interior organizational changes that still had an impact on meaning, such as which pieces were chosen to represent the three focal projects (mostly condensing for the sake of readability against the background organizing construct) and how to navigate between sections (an attempt to bring the magpie’s nest as metaphor more cohesively into the piece). The webtext was also more deliberately experimental because there was a corresponding traditional print piece already accepted and in the publication project. Overall, this project’s changes in inscape reflect pressures from editors, time constraints, the partiality of metaphors, and the conceptual force of key images or symbols, genre pressures, and tensions between traditional and experimental scholarship.
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