I. Opening

The scene: A crowded campus café, midday. Two women—one onscreen, one offscreen—sit at a table strewn with books, computers, and coffee mugs.

Video Recording 3.1 5 October 2016 (11:00-13:30)
Screen Recording 1.1 5 October 2016 (2:10:00-2:12:30)

Video 3: People Introduction

This video clip highlights a moment of inscaping in which “people” had an especially salient influence on the invention process. Kaustavi and I had just finished talking about an idea for another collaborative project and were settling in to work. I pulled up an email exchange between Kaustavi and Kerry, a professional animator with whom she was collaborating. I noticed several photos included in the exchange, particularly one that I’d seen before but didn’t feel comfortable using because it was on social media rather than part of our collaborative files. I asked Kaustavi whether I could add the photos from the email exchange to our collaborative online “Box” folder, and whether she had any additional photos she would be willing to share; she replied yes on both accounts. After adding the photos to “Box,” I opened a new PowerPoint file and began to manipulate the slides and images into what would become the first draft of the webtext’s inscape.

This brief scene comes from a composing session with Kaustavi, just as I was beginning to explore the first web design mockup for our collaborative webtext. We were working together in the Heirloom Café on OSU campus, a frequent meeting place for grad students and professors in the central campus area. After Kaustavi left, I made the following comment in my post-session reflection:

The video and resulting reflection provide brief glimpses into this total experience of a dynamic, collaborative invention process. Building on our ongoing collaboration at the intersections between scholarly and creative work, I drew on an image seen earlier on social media that was the result of Kaustavi’s collaboration with a photographer; that was embedded in her conversation with professional animator; and that became a key part of our collaborative design process in developing a multimodal scholarly project. In these moments, my experiences of webtext invention were deeply intertwined with the people whose paths this project crossed. As I noted then, this session was not representative of my webtext invention process as a whole; the vast majority of work took place more or less in solitude. However, it does offer one moment in which the underlying influences various people have on the webtext invention process come to the surface in a particularly visible way. In this chapter, I take a closer, more critical look at the impacts of people in various roles on the webtext invention process and, in particular, the kinds of influences these collaborations have on a webtext’s developing inscape.