I. Introduction

In her inaugural 2008 webtext for the journal Kairos’s Inventio section, Boyd presents an updated version of a previously published article, revised for a web environment. At one point she exclaims in all capital letters, “I WISH THERE WERE A WAY TO VISUALLY TRACK THE IMPACT OF MY CHANGING VIEWS ON THIS TEXT, I.E., THE DIFFERENCE THROUGH WHICH I WAS PULLED!” As her views and arguments changed, they made a visible impact on her webtext’s design. However, her audience can only see the two published versions, two flattened layers in a complex, messy progression of various idea configurations through time. Several years later (2016), Takayoshi called for literacy researchers to make visible their own messy processes of negotiating differences by sharing “reflective methodological narratives” (17). This chapter seeks to respond to both Boyd’s and Takayoshi’s calls by introducing a methodological narrative for making visible the differences through which a webtext’s argument is pulled and the autoethnographic data collection methods used to make this tracking possible.

As scholars such as Takayoshi, McElroy, Burgess and Hamming, and Siddiqui note, there is a lot we actually don’t know about what happens when composers engage in digital composing, much less about what kind of impact those activities have on a digital project’s developing design and implicit argument. In this chapter, I argue that autoethnographic documentation of both successive drafts and composing practices can be a productive way to map chains of literate activity. I will trace the discussions around autoethnography as an approach to researching writing and digital composing, with a particular emphasis on its affordances for tracking the differences through which a webtext’s design is pulled--and for tracking these differences’ impacts on a webtext’s design as a knowledge-making artifact.

In the following sections, I review discussions on autoethnography as a research methodology for gathering data on literate practices.

A. Ethnography and Composing Studies

Ethnography is a long-standing methodology in research for writing and composition. Writing instructors and researchers in composition’s early disciplinary days faced new challenges in the 1970s when a new group of writers, deemed “underprepared” by traditional standards, entered the university system through open universities (Bishop). Further studies (such as those by Emig and Shaughnessy) made it clear that these students were not lacking in intelligence. Rather, they operated with different sets of systematic rules for writing and language use. Researchers began to inquire about the importance of social/external factors on the writing process and realized that studies of writing in classroom settings alone wouldn’t be enough to document the full context of influences acting on a writer/and to which the writer was responding. Ethnographic research in composition (including technical communication) arose in the mid-1980s (Goodall, Bishop, Katz) with works like Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways with Words as researchers looked for ways to start to investigate writing in its social contexts. This ethnographic turn led to movements like New Literacy Studies (Brandt, Street, Gee, Moss) and expanded into investigations of diverse identities and subjectivities in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Studies on increasingly complex social contexts and ecological understandings of writing (Cooper) have drawn attention to the complex sociomaterial circumstances in which writing actually happens (Hawk, Dobrin, Prior and Shipka, Takayoshi). The rise of digital technologies as everyday writing tools has played a key role in both enacting and documenting these literate phenomena.

B. Autoethnography

As a particular kind of ethnographic data collection, “autoethnography” tends to be introduced in a cluster of related terms in order to carve out its general sphere of meaning. Other words in the cluster include “narrative ethnography, personal ethnography, performative writing, creative analytical practice, lyrical sociology, autobiography, narrative heuristics” (Goodall 11), “creative ethnography, ethnographic nonfiction, experimental ethnography, [and] autoethnographic writing” (Lawless 3), “radical empiricism, critical autobiography, phenomenological ethnography, psychobiography, personal narratives, narratives of the self, self-stories, personal essays, writing-stories, personal ethnography, self-ethnography, evocative ethnography, autopathography, personal writing, reflexive ethnography, ethnographic memoir, emotionalism, narrative ethnography, [and] native ethnography” (Ellis 40). Ellis and Bochner have gone so far as to identify sixty terms in use in scholarly literature that overlap with “autoethnography” in some way.

For the purposes of this project, autoethnography is an approach to conducting research that includes the self as subject. This approach involves “writing about the personal and its relationship to culture” through “relational and institutional stories affected by history and social structure, which themselves are dialectically revealed through actions, feelings, thoughts, and language” (Ellis 37-38). Numerous fields of study conducting qualitative research have employed autoethnographic methodologies, such as communication studies (Ellis and Bochner, Goodall), folklore (Lawless), anthropology (Pink, Uotinen), organization and culture (Boyle and Parry), cultural theory (Anzaldua), composition (Rose), and digital composing (Rhodes and Alexander, Takayoshi). Thus, although this dissertation investigates a relatively narrow form of scholarship, the research methods I develop in this project contribute to conversations on literate practices across multiple disciplinary contexts.

C. Autoethnography and Reflective Storytelling

I want to distinguish between self-reflective storytelling and autoethnography as methodology; as understood for the purposes of this project, autoethnography is concerned with methodology and developing generalizable research knowledge, as opposed to self-reflection and storytelling for primarily aesthetic or therapeutic purposes. This is where autoethnography is distinct from recent discussions on mindfulness and spiritual autobiography in the teaching of writing (Foehr and Schiller, Gere, Kirsch, O’Reilly). Autoethnography is a tool that demands reflexivity and may build mindfulness in the process (Franks), but such a mental state is not the ultimate goal of an autoethnographic study. Likewise, autoethnography is distinct from expressivist approaches to teaching and researching composing practices (Elbow, Macrorie). Though not wishing to misrepresent or jettison the discipline’s expressivist roots (Hawk), autoethnography as understood in this project is distinct from expressivism in that it is not self-expression for the sake of developing the author’s own voice.

At the same time, the lines between autoethnography and reflective storytelling can get blurred, and as the list of terms at the beginning of this section indicates, autoethnographic writing shares much in common with a range of reflective personal writing practices. Both storytelling about one’s practices and ethnographic research have long been a part of composition’s knowledge-making practices. North identifies (if somewhat pejoratively) both “lore” and “ethnography” as methodologies for researching writing early in composition’s disciplinary history. There is also a long history of reflective storytelling and stories as valued ways of communicating knowledge about literacy, as seen in the work of Selfe and Hawisher.

As “an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness” (Ellis 37), autoethnographic studies differ in the degree to which they include other subjects beside the researcher; connect the personal to the political; devote explicit attention to methods; and push formal boundaries. Takayoshi’s autoethnographic study, for example, reads very much like a traditional scholarly article. She gives a relatively straightforward account of data drawn from personal experience, then emphasizes the broader cultural context to which this individual experience points. Uotinen and Franks both alternate between passages of expressive storytelling and a critical discussion of these passages in a more typical tone for an academic essay. Ronai, on the other hand, puts her individual story at the forefront of the study and emphasizes experiential detail. Ellis’s methodological novel on autoethnography puts more of the formal discussion into endnotes and citations while emphasizing the narrative elements of leading a grad seminar focalized through her perspective and experience as participating narrator. Other works, such as Alexander and Williams, incorporate autoethnographic components without necessarily announcing them as such. They use their DMAC experiences as a framework for theorizing distributed invention without need for further justification demonstrates that such storytelling is already an important disciplinary practice for composing scholars.

D. Autoethnography and Everyday Stories

Although autoethnography has been used to critically examine life-changing, potentially traumatic stories, Uotinen demonstrates that it can also be a powerful mode of investigating small, everyday stories. This focus on embodied, contextualized knowledge and the personal/individual as a valid/valued perspective connects strongly with feminist approaches to writing and rhetoric. As Royster and Kirsch note in Feminist Rhetorical Practices, “[W]e seek to reclaim the genre of the meditation in current scholarly practice in order to claim strategic contemplation deliberately as taking the time, space, and resources to think about, through, and around our work as an important meditative dimension of scholarly productivity” (p. 21). I understand autoethnography here as in this vein of strategic contemplation, as a way of using time (rather than wasting time) as an important element to contribute to scholarly productivity and knowledge making, and even perhaps as a way of “queering” time (Rhodes and Alexander, Intro2b) in deliberately deploying an alternative temporality that resists the pressure to produce work without taking time to think.

E. Autoethnography and Webtexts

An autoethnographic approach connects well with the current culture of reflective practice around webtext composing. This emphasis on self-reflection can perhaps be expected for scholars who both study and enact digital literacy practices (Delagrange; Journet, Ball, and Trauman). Many webtexts include guides for readers on how to navigate them, or reflections on how they set up their organization (Yergeau et al.), though sometimes these moves are also deliberately obscured as part of their knowledge-making work. Longer webtext projects like Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self (Rhodes and Alexander) and Provocations: Reconstructing the Archive (eds. Berry, Hawisher, and Selfe) encode their composers’ presences in ways made uniquely possible through digital technologies’ affordances for translating the self in daily life into a public knowledge-making space. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy has a section (Inventio) devoted to “reflections that focus on the decisions, contexts, and contributions that have constituted a particular webtext” (“Submissions”). For a field attentive to networked, mediated composing practices in everyday life, with the ability to fuse theory and practice in the creation of knowledge, the desire to investigate the impact of one’s life and literate composing practices as readily available data sources can perhaps be hard to resist.

A webtext environment offers additional possibilities for experimenting with form and communicating the researcher’s multilayered, multichanneled experiences. In Techne, for example, Rhodes and Alexander alternate in their individual chapters between images, poems, audio files, videos, and traditional scholarly prose, with video clips frequently featuring the authors interspersed between sections and pages. Palmeri et al., DeVoss et al., Shipka, and Hidalgo likewise use video clips to record and represent their dispersed, embodied composing practices. Although scholarly autoethnography can at least in theory be communicated via a range of media channels attuned to the fine-tuned knowledge-making possibilities developed through verbal discussion (Pink), it seems that webtext composers tend to draw upon an implicit alliance between autoethnography as a methodology based on self-documentation and video as a relatively easily accessible media channel for representing the self in everyday contexts.

Autoethnography (as methodology) and webtexts (as publication form) also both speak to key tensions within contemporary academic culture. Across disciplines, many studies mention potential benefits of autoethnographic research as an important strategic tool for qualitatively oriented research disciplines at a time when current academic culture can be a hostile environment for such work. For example, in the wake of the 2008 recession, humanities disciplines face significant budget cuts (Goodall, Lawless, Smith). Hayles and Pressman suggest that one response to these pressures might be to transition from an intellectual “culture of critique” (xiv) to an “ethic of making” (xv)--a move both performed and debated among digital humanists and other creators of new media scholarship (Delagrange, Gold, Underberg and Zorn). Similarly, Boyle and Parry highlight the “emotional and evocative nature” of autoethnographic scholarship as a component of its total impact and posit that “the critical factor ‘n’ in much organizational research is the number of people who read the research, rather than the number of people who are the subjects of the research” (188). In “good-enough times” (Smith) where tensions are high and funds are low, disciplinary communities may be more open to exploring new approaches for creating and communicating specialized knowledge with a broader audience.

This is not to say, however, that autoethnography is a surefire way to gain more readers, or that webtexts are a panacea to save the humanities. Not all arguments are best expressed via webtexts, and as discussed above, “emotional and evocative” storytelling does not automatically equal a stronger contribution to scholarly literature. Rather, I want to highlight how these more experimental approaches to creating and representing scholarly knowledge can be useful tools among other forms of scholarly knowledge-making to build engagement with public audiences. I agree with Pink that, rather than ignoring or replacing the vast intellectual resources developed through more established forms of scholarly investigation and discourse, “[i]t is more beneficial to probe the unique qualities of [experimental scholarship] and determine what these contribute to ethnographic representation that writing cannot” (141). As two forms of research especially attentive to the aesthetic dimensions of knowledge creation and communication (Ball 2004, Goodall, Lawless, Franks, Uotinen, Ellis), I suggest that autoethnography (as methodology) and webtexts (as forms of presentation) can be powerful tools for engaging public audiences in collaboration with more traditional academic approaches. It is my hope that this project will draw attention to work already being done at the intersections between these two approaches to scholarship and knowledge creation, and also provide models to support, promote, and sustain such work in the future by demonstrating both its potential for intellectual value and making it seem more approachable via increased, radical transparency to a webtext’s development as it is pulled through multiple layers of difference.

In particular, this project seeks to investigate the forces behind a webtext’s changing inscape across drafts, the implications that this change in design has upon the performed argument, and the implication that these forces have as co-agents in the creation of scholarly knowledge. Ball has identified the integral connection between argument and design in a webtext’s rhetorical performance as a knowledge-making artifact. Furthermore, scholars such as Palmeri et al. and Alexander and Williams have documented their own composing processes in order to identify the highly distributed nature of digital invention. Uotinen identifies autoethnography’s methodological capacity to attune to “small agency,” or the impacts of subtle forces in daily life that often go unnoticed. To this end, autoethnography can be a tool for tracing the role of various distributed agentive influences on the process of invention in composing a webtext project over time, a longstanding question in composition research more broadly (Bawarshi, Lauer, LeFevre). This tracing is especially important for examining design principles like metaphor or other organizing concepts (Lakoff, Whittemore), which are often extremely powerful in exerting agency on thinking/composing practices but are often largely intuitively, invisibly deployed. I suggest that these influences need to be retrospectively examined in order to unpack their full sociocultural, material implications and their impact for understanding the way a webtext organized according to these principles performs an argument via its design.